Renée Bergland

Renée Bergland is a Professor of Literature and Writing. She teaches the introductory course (LTWR 199 Approaches to Literature), the capstone course (LTWR 390 Advanced Seminar in Literature and Writing), and a bit of everything in between.

Bergland is a literary critic and a historian of science who is passionately interested in the nuts and bolts of writing craft.

In 2026, Bergland was awarded an NEH Public Scholar grant to support writing a book on Melville's Moby-Dick. She is the author of Poetry for a Burning Planet: Emily Dickinson's Guide to the Apocalypse (forthcoming from Princeton University Press); Natural Magic: Emily Dickinson, Charles Darwin, and the Dawn of Modern Science (Princeton 2024); Maria Mitchell and the Sexing of Science: An Astronomer Among the American Romantics (Beacon 2008); and The National Uncanny: Indian Ghosts and American Subjects (Dartmouth College Press 2000). With Gary Williams, she edited Philosophies of Sex: Critical Essays on The Hermaphrodite (Ohio State 2012). Bergland has published articles, essays, and reviews for general readers in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Nautilus, Science, and The Boston Globe.

Her more scholarly writing has appeared in American Literary History, ESQ, SIGNS, The Nathaniel Hawthorne Review, ISIS, Legacy, Emily Dickinson Journal, Women’s Studies, and the Journal of American History. She has contributed to essay collections including: The Puritan Origins of American Sex, The Heath Anthology of American Literature, The Gothic Other: Racial and Social Constructions in the Literary Imagination, Blackwell’s Companion to the Literatures of Colonial America, Blackwell’s Companion to Emily Dickinson, The Spectralities Reader: Ghosts and Haunting in Contemporary Cultural Theory, The Oxford History of the Novel in English (Vol. 5: The American Novel to 1870), De Gruyter’s Handbook of the American Novel of the Nineteenth Century, Oxford’s Emily Dickinson Handbook, Emily Dickinson and the Anthropocene, and The Oxford History of Poetry in English (Vol. 10: American Poetry: First English Encounters to the U.S. Civil War).

In her writing, Bergland tells stories that connect history to the present day. In her own life, she is an environmentalist and an anti-racist feminist who loves poetry and politics as much as she loves science and mathematics. As an undergraduate at St. John’s College, Bergland read “The Great Books.” Her graduate training at Columbia University emphasized comparatist approaches to literature and culture. She is particularly interested in making interdisciplinary connections between STEM and the humanities.

Bergland started teaching at Simmons in 1999. She has also researched and taught at Dartmouth College, Harvard University, MIT, the University of Bergen, the University of New Hampshire, and Boston University. She has received major fellowships from the Sloan Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Fulbright Program and research support from the United Kingdom’s Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Emily Dickinson International Society, the Nantucket Historical Society, and the Boston Athenaeum. 

Education

PhD, English and Comparative Literature, from Columbia University, New York, New York

BA, St. John's College, Annapolis, Maryland

Publications

• Poetry for a Burning Planet: Emily Dickinson’s Guide to the Apocalypse. (forthcoming from Princeton University Press, 2027)
   
• Natural Magic: Emily Dickinson, Charles Darwin, and the Dawn of Modern Science (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2024; paperback 2026). Awarded the Hughes Prize by the British Society for the History of Science, 2025. One of the “Best Books of 2024,” New Yorker.
   
• Philosophies of Sex: Critical Essays on Julia Ward Howe’s Hermaphrodite, edited with Gary Williams (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2012).
   
• Maria Mitchell and the Sexing of Science: An Astronomer Among the American Romantics (Boston: Beacon Press, 2008; 2nd ed, 2018). Massachusetts Book Award Finalist, 2009.
   
• The National Uncanny: Indian Ghosts and American Subjects (Hanover: Dartmouth College Press, 2000).

Awards

Major Individual Fellowships

• National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar Grant, 2026
• National Endowment for the Humanities “We the People” Fellowship, 2006–7
• Fulbright Professor of American Studies (Norway), 2001–2 

Group Fellowships

• AHRC (British Arts and Humanities Research Council) Research Network, 2009–2010
• (AHRC Participants: Amherst College, University of Plymouth (UK) and University of Exeter (UK))
• Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship for Faculty Career Flexibility, Simmons, 2008–9

Short-Term Fellowships

• Emily Dickinson Museum Interpretive Plan (NEH Public Humanities), 2018–2020
• Emily Dickinson International Society (EDIS) Scholar in Amherst Award, 2009
• Simmons College President’s Fund for Faculty Excellence (Research Award), 2008
• E. Geoffrey and Elizabeth Thayer Verney Fellow, Nantucket Historical Association, 2006
• Caleb Loring, Jr. Fellow, Boston Athenaeum, 2005
• Simmons College Fund for Research Awards, 2000, 2002, 2004, 2007, 2018
• Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Studies Travel Grant, 1997