• Royce Fellowship
Michelle
Niemann

Concentration 

Literature

Award Year 

2001

Michelle researched and wrote three critical essays this summer on Muriel Rukeyser, an American poet who suffered critical neglect because of the overtly political nature of her work. She contributed to a growing body of writing reclaiming Rukeyser as a major poet and challenging the definitions of poetry that discounted her.

Michelle is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Environmental Humanities and English at UCLA. In August 2014, she earned her Ph.D. in English literature from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she was active in the Center for Culture, History and Environment (CHE). Her research focuses on poetry and poetics, twentieth-century American literature, and ecocriticism, and her articles have appeared in the Journal of Modern Literature and Victorian Poetry. She is currently working on a book project titled “Organic Forming: Poetry, Ecology, Food.”