Zoom Lecture: Susan Fenimore Cooper's Youth in Europe

In this Live Zoom presentation, Rochelle Johnson explores Susan Fenimore Cooper’s coming of age in Europe, where her family lived for seven years. Through frescoes and ruins, castles and museums, Cooper learned important lessons, especially concerning the nature of time. We will tour a small bit of Europe alongside Cooper, considering how the Old World lessons she gleaned kindled her later environmental understanding of New World landscapes.

This Zoom presentation is offered for no charge, but a donation of $20 is suggested. Donations ensure that we are able to offer programs of this quality in the future and we greatly appreciate a donation of any amount.

Rochelle L. Johnson is a creative writer, a scholar, and an educator, and she holds the Bernie McCain Chair in the Humanities at the College of Idaho, where she teaches courses in the environmental humanities and in writing. Rochelle’s scholarship on 19th-century landscape aesthetics appears in a variety of journals and collections. She is the author of Passions for Nature: Nineteenth-Century America’s Aesthetics of Alienation, which situates the environmental writings of Susan Fenimore Cooper amid the landscape philosophies of Cooper’s era. Rochelle also has co-edited five books, including three dedicated to Cooper’s work and the 2021 anthology, Thoreau in an Age of Crisis: New Essays on an American Icon. Her scholarly research has been supported by the Idaho Humanities Council, Yale University’s Beinecke Library, the American Antiquarian Society, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, which awarded her a research fellowship toward her current book. A former president of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, she is also Immediate Past President of the Thoreau Society. Find more at: RochelleJohnsonWriter.com.

Host or Publisher Fenimore Art Museum