Nicolas S. Witschi

Photo of Nicolas S. Witschi
Nicolas S. Witschi
Associate Dean and Professor of English
Office: 
(269) 387-4356
Fax: 
(269) 387-2562
Location: 
619 Sprau Tower, Mail Stop 5331
Mailing address: 
Department of English
Western Michigan University
1903 W Michigan Ave
Kalamazoo MI 49008-5331 USA
Education: 
  • Ph.D., English, University of Oregon, 1998
  • M.A., English, University of Colorado, 1993
  • B.F.A., Film and Television, New York University, 1988
Teaching interests: 
  • Film interpretation
  • Literature and culture of the U.S.
  • American literature II
  • 1925: An American year
Research interests: 
  • Film history and criticism
  • Literature and the American west
  • American literary realism and naturalism
Creative interests: 
  • Photography
Bio: 

Dr. Nicolas Witschi is a professor of English at Western Michigan University.

He is the author of Traces of Gold: California's Natural Resources and the Claim to Realism in Western American Literature (U of Alabama P, 2002); of a Western Writers Series monograph on Alonzo "Old Block" Delano (Boise State, 2006); of articles and essays on Mary Austin, John Muir, Sinclair Lewis, and Henry James; and the editor of A Companion to the Literature and Culture of the American West (Blackwell, 2011). He also regularly contributes to the "Late-19th-Century Literature" chapter of the American Literary Scholarship: An Annual, published by Duke United Press. He is working on a book-length study of the contributions of autobiographical writings by famous gunfighters to the development of the western as both a cultural phenomenon and a literary genre.

Witschi has been a Fulbright Junior Lecturer in American Studies at the University of Regensburg, Germany (1999-2000), and a participant in an National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute on "The Redemptive West" at The Huntington Library (2005). He has also received a Dean's Faculty and Staff Appreciation Award from Western Michigan University and fellowships-in-residence at The Huntington Library and the Houghton Library at Harvard University. He is a former co-president of the Western Literature Association and sits on the editorial board of the Association's journal, Western American Literature.