Rate My Professor Melissa Brotton

Melissa Brotton is Associate Professor of English and Chair of the Department of English at La Sierra University, positions she has held since joining the faculty in 2007. She also serves as Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. Brotton earned her Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of North Dakota in 2004 and her M.S. in Clinical Psychology from the University of Idaho. Her research focuses on the poetry of the Victorian era, principally the works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning. She is also exploring ecotheology as a subject of study, investigating the interplay between Victorian poetry and theological perspectives on nature and the divine.

Brotton's scholarly contributions include multiple annotated bibliographies on Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning published in Victorian Literature and Culture: for 1994 (2000), 1996 (1999), 1997 (2000), and 1998 (2001). She co-authored the article “In th’Immensity of Nature Lost!”: Vision, Nature, and the Metaphysical in the Landscape of Richard Lewis’s “A Journey from Patapsco to Annapolis” with Lora Geriguis and Sam McBride, appearing in Early American Literature in 2016. Additional publications feature “Two Unpublished Stanzas and a Source for an Early Poem by Elizabeth Barrett Browning” (2019) and a review of Susan J. Wolfson’s Romantic Interactions: Social Being and the Turns of Literary Action (2012). Brotton edited the volume Ecotheology in the Humanities: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Understanding the Divine in Nature. As a contributing editor for The Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, she has supported critical editions in Victorian studies. Through her teaching and leadership in the English Department, which offers B.A. programs in Literature & Writing and Secondary Teaching, as well as an M.A. in English, Brotton guides students in literature, writing, and interdisciplinary approaches.