Paul Siewers

The Rev. Fr. Paul Siewers is Associate Professor of English Literary Studies at Bucknell and a Priest in the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia who serves the Bucknell Orthodox Christian community. A member of the President’s Sustainability Council at Bucknell, he is faculty coordinator of the Bucknell Greenway and of the Stories of the Susquehanna Valley student documentary project. He is Director of the Bucknell Program for American Leadership and a founding convenor of the Bucknell Faculty Staff Christian Association, and Editor of The Paideia Review, a project on Orthodox Christianity and culture. A former William E. Simon Visiting Fellow in Religion and Public Life at the James Madison Program for American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University, he also previously worked as award-winning Urban Affairs Writer at the Chicago Sun-Times and National Correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor.

Education

Ph.D. and M.A., English, University of Illinois
M.A., Early British Studies, University of Wales
M.S.J., Medill School of Journalism

Diploma in Pastoral Theology, St. John of Kronstadt Pastoral School, and Liturgical Training at Holy Trinity Monastery

Teaching and Scholarly Interests

Christian literature, ecopoetics, and ecosemiotics; the history of the novel; literary resistance to totalitarianism; 21^st-century journalism and “Great Books” education. Current projects include surveys of Christian ecopoetics and of American and Russian ecosemiotics.

Select Publications

"Early Irish Ecosemiotics" In Scél lem dúib:Gerard Murphy's Early Irish Lyrics Revisited (collection under review by University College Cork Press).

"From Eriugena to Dostoevsky: Christian 'Universalism' in Hiberno-Latin Contexts and its Continued Significance." In Sources of Knowledge: Studies in Old English and Anglo-Latin Literature in Honour of Charles D. Wright (Brepols, 2023).

"Secular Rights in the Orthodox Christian Tradition," an invited essay in The Egocentrism of Human Rights? Reflections with Christos Yannaras on the Polis and Ecclesia, based on a conference at Ohio State University's Bioethics Center, March 2023. Volume under review by St. Vladimir Seminary Press.

"Nature." In The Chaucer Encyclopedia. Ed. Richard Neuhauser, Vincent Gillespie, Jessica Rosenfeld, and Katie Walker. London: Wiley-Blackwell. 2023.

“Orthodox Marriage on Middle-earth." In Amid Weeping there is Joy: Orthodox Perspectives on Tolkien's Fantastic Realm. Ed. Cyril Gary Jenkins. Invited contribution to edited book collection. Emmaus, PA: St. Basil Center for Orthodox Thought and Culture, Basilian Media and Publishing. 2021.

“’Well, I’m back,’ he said. Tolkien, Loneliness, and The Decline of the West.” In Amid Weeping there is Joy: Orthodox Perspectives on Tolkien's Fantastic Realm. Ed. Cyril Gary Jenkins. Invited contribution to edited book collection. Emmaus, PA: St. Basil Center for Orthodox Thought and Culture, Basilian Media and Publishing. 2021.

“Transhuman Totalitarianism versus Christian Theosis: From Russian Orthodoxy with Love.” Journal of Christian Bioethics 26 (2020): 325-344.

Co-Editor, Healing Humanity: Confronting Our Moral Crisis. Holy Trinity Publications, 2020. Author of "ICXC NIKA: The Liberty of Theosis" in the collection, pp. 92-112.

“Eriugena’s Irish Backgrounds.” Invited contribution to A Companion to Eriugena, ed, Stephen Lahey and Adrian Guiu. Brill, 2019. 9-30.

Co-Editor, The Totalitarian Legacy of the Bolshevik Revolution. Lexington Books, 2019.

Co-Producer, “Stories of the Susquehanna Valley” student documentary series: Stories of the Susquehanna: Utopian Dreams aired on public TV station WVIA in spring 2016. The Coopers and Conservation at the Susquehanna Headwaters in November 2018. Churches of Coal Country and Bucknell in the Civil War and Underground Railroad, in post-production.

Editor and contributor, Re-Imagining Nature: Environmental Humanities and Ecosemiotics (Bucknell, 2013). Authored "Song, Tree, and Spring: Environmental Meaning and the Environmental Humanities," and "The Ecopoetics of Creation: Genesis LXX 1-3".

"The Periphyseon, the Irish 'Otherworld,' and Early Medieval Nature," in Eriugena and Creation (Brepols, 2014)

"The Green Otherworlds of Early English Literature" in The Cambridge Companion to Environment and Literature(Cambridge, 2013)

"Orthodoxy and Ecopoetics" in Toward an Ecology of Transfiguration: Orthodox Christian Perspectives on Environment, Nature, and Creation (Fordham University Press, 2013)

"Pre-Modern Ecosemiotics: The Green World as Literary Ecology," in The Space of Culture-The Place of Nature (University of Tartu Press 2011)

"Ecopoetics and the Origins of English Literature," in Environmental Criticism for the Twenty-First Century (Routledge 2011)

"Spenser's Green World," Early English Studies (2010)

"Ecocriticism" in A Dictionary of Cultural and Critical Theory 2d. ed. (Wiley-Blackwell 2010)

Strange Beauty: Ecocritical Approaches to Early Medieval Landscape (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009)

"Landscapes of Conversion: Guthlac's Mound and Grendel's Mere as Expressions of Anglo-Saxon Nation-Building," in The Postmodern Beowulf (West Virginia University Press 2007)

"The Greyest-Greenest-Bluest Eye: Colours of Martyrdom and Colours of the Winds as Iconographic Landscapes," Cambrian Medieval Celtic Studies 50 (2005): 31-66

Co-editor and contributor, Tolkien's Modern Middle Ages (2005; paperback edition 2009). Authored "Tolkien’s Cosmic-Christian Ecology"

Personal Website