Jack Bushnell
Jack Bushnell became chair of the English Department in August 2007. His administrative experience at UW-Eau Claire has included nearly eight years on the University Senate, five years as a member of the University Academic Policies Committee, and service on university-wide general education and strategic planning work groups. He is committed to liberal education and collaboration across disciplinary boundaries, particularly between the humanities and the sciences, but also between the humanities and the arts.
Jack received his Bachelor’s degree in English and Russian from the University of Colorado in Boulder, and his Master’s and Ph.D. in British romanticism from Rutgers University. He also worked for nearly a dozen years in advertising and marketing at two New York City ad agencies (where he eventually became a Vice President) and at the corporate headquarters of Nabisco in New Jersey. His advertising clients included a manufacturer of agricultural products, the New York Zoological Society, and the Northrop Corporation, the maker of the B-2 stealth bomber. Largely because of his eclectic background, he was hired by UW-Eau Claire in 1995 to teach scientific and technical writing. He became a full Professor in 2005, and he has regularly taught courses in science and nature writing, grant writing, British romanticism (at the graduate level), baseball writing, and composition. Because he is an award-winning children’s author, he also teaches the senior workshop in writing for children.
Jack’s publishing interests are as varied as his teaching interests, ranging from scholarly articles on science or literature, to fiction, to memoir, to personal essays on nature and on baseball. His academic work has appeared in such refereed journals as Technical Communication Quarterly, a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, Studies in Romanticism, The Wordsworth Circle, Popular Culture Review, and Studies in the Novel. His personal essays, including memoir and nature pieces, have been published in a number of national literary magazines, notably Tampa Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Elysian Fields Quarterly, and Sport Literate, as well as in such regional magazines as Wisconsin People & Ideas and Wisconsin Natural Resources. He has three books for children, two from William Morrow and one from the Chippewa Valley Museum Press. Circus of the Wolves (1994) won awards from the International Reading Association, Friends of American Writers, and Council for Wisconsin Writers. Sky Dancer (1996) was named a Best Book of the Year by the Children’s Book Committee at Bank Street College. And Farm Crossing: The Amazing Adventures of Addie and Zachary (2004) won the Nonfiction Children’s Book Award runner-up from the Council for Wisconsin Writers.
