Dr. Christopher Rieger, Assistant Professor of English, joined the Southeast Missouri State University faculty in 2007, after teaching the previous four years at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri.

He is the author of Clear-Cutting Eden: Ecology and the Pastoral in Southern Literature, published in 2009 by the University of Alabama Press.  The book examines how four prominent Southern authors—Erskine Caldwell, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Zora Neale Hurston and William Faulkner—portray nature in view of the destabilizing effects of the Great Depression, the rise of Southern modernism, and the mechanization of agricultural jobs.

Rieger grew up in South Carolina and holds a bachelor’s degree from Emory University and master’s and doctor's degrees from Louisiana State University.  His doctoral dissertation, directed by noted Faulkner scholar John Lowe, won the 2002 Lewis P. Simpson dissertation award, given annually for the best dissertation in the English department at Louisiana State University. 

Rieger has published essays and presented conference papers on James Fenimore Cooper, Margaret Mitchell and Larry Brown, as well as the focal authors of his book.  In his criticism, Rieger frequently examines the handling of ecological and environmental issues in literary texts.

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