Devin Phillip Zuber
Associate Professor of American Studies, Religion, and Literature the George F. Dole Professor of Swedenborgian Studies
I’m an associate professor of American Studies, Religion, and Literature at the GTU, and also presently the Chair of the Department for Historical and Cultural Studies of Religion. I teach in our PhD program’s concentrations for Art & Religion, New Religious Movements, and Religion & Literature. My position is housed at the GTU’s Center for Swedenborgian Studies (CSS), and much of my teaching and research remains focused on the nineteenth-century cultural reception of the Scandinavian scientist-turned-mystic, Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772). I have also been a member of the Public Theology Inquiry Group at UC Berkeley’s Center for the Study of Religion.
Prior to coming to Berkeley in 2011, I taught at the University of Osnabrück and the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, both in Germany, and at Queens College in New York City. I’ve been a fellow, scholar-in-residence, or visiting research professor at the Eccles Centre for American Studies at the British Library (London), at the Wabash Center for Religion and Theology at Wabash College in Indiana, in Stockholm University’s Department for Aesthetics and Culture (Sweden), at the Mesa Writer’s Refuge in Point Reyes, California (with the Gardarev Center), and at the Rachel Carson Center for the Environment at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. In 2016, I was also a scholar-in-residence at the former estate of the film director Ingmar Bergman on Fårö island (Sweden).
I welcome inquiries from students interested in working on MA and PhD projects related to religion & literature and/or religion & the arts (particularly within Romanticism and the “long” nineteenth century), western esotericism and New Religious Movements, and the environmental humanities broadly construed (ecocriticism, eco-art).
DEGREES AND CERTIFICATIONS
PhD in English Literature, CUNY Graduate Center, 2010
MPhil, CUNY Graduate Center, 2007
MA, Queens College, CUNY, 2008
BA, Bryn Athyn College, 2000
RESEARCH AND TEACHING INTERESTS
- Environmental Literature and Ecocriticism
- Religion & Literature
- Romanticism
- Aesthetics
- Emanuel Swedenborg
- Western Esotericism and New Religious Movements
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
- A Language of Things: Swedenborg and the American Environmental Imagination. Monograph with the University of Virginia Press, 2019. (https://www.upress.virginia.edu/title/5062)
- “The Luminous Body as Image and Word: Reading Teresa with Marina Abramović.” Chapter contribution to Santa Teresa: Critical Filiations on a Mystic. Edited by Martina Bengert and Iris Roebling-Grau. Orbis Romanicus Book Series. Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 2019. 287-302.
- “An Apocalypse of Mind: Cracking the Jerusalem Code in Emanuel Swedenborg’s Theosophy.” Chapter contribution to Tracing the Jerusalem Code: Christian Cultures in Scandinavia. Edited by Ragnhild Zorgti. Oslo: University of Oslo Press, 2019.
- “Can Beauty (still) Save the Planet? Eco-Aesthetics for the Anthropocene.” Chapter contribution to the exhibition catalogue Gestures to the Divine: Works by Hagit Cohen. Berkeley: Center for the Arts and Religion, 2018. 16-21.
- “9/11 as Memento Mori: Still-Life and Image in Don DeLillo’s Ekphrastic Fiction.” Chapter contribution to Radical Planes? Refiguring Crisis and Continuity in Post-9/11 Literature. Edited by Dunja Mohr and Birgit Däwes. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2016. 200-218.
COURSES TAUGHT
- San Francisco and the 1960’s: Religion and Counter-cultural Poetics (Fall 2018)
- Religion, Literature, and Climate Change (Spring 2019)
- Conversion and Literature (co-taught with Dr. Naomi Seidman, Spring 2018)
- American Religion, Ecology, and Literature (Spring 2017)
- William Blake and Religious Counter-cultures (Spring 2015)