Nicolas S. Witschi

Nicolas S. Witschi, Ph. D., is a professor of English and associate dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Western Michigan University. He previously served as chair of the Department of English for four years. He is the author of Traces of Gold: California's Natural Resources and the Claim to Realism in Western American Literature (University of Alabama Press, 2002); a Western Writers Series monograph on Alonzo “Old Block" Delano (Boise State University, 2006); and articles and essays on literary realism and film, California Gold Rush humor, detective fiction in the American West, and authors such as Mary Austin, John Muir, Sinclair Lewis, Henry James and Raymond Chandler. He is also the editor of A Companion to the Literature and Culture of the American West (Blackwell, 2011).

For many years, he regularly contributed the "Late-19th-Century Literature" chapter of American Literary Scholarship: An Annual, published by Duke University 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. He is currently co-editing a book on the cinematic works of Taylor Sheridan, creator of the TV series Yellowstone.

Witschi has been a Fulbright junior lecturer in American studies at the University of Regensburg, Germany (1999-2000), and a participant in a 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 from the Huntington Library and the Houghton Library at Harvard University. He is a former co-president of the Western Literature Association and serves on the editorial board of the association's journal, Western American Literature.

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