Steven White is a soft-spoken professor of Spanish with a taste for high speeds. The chair of the department of modern languages and literatures has been a member of the St. Lawrence University faculty for 20 years. “I feel really lucky to be able to work at such a great liberal arts school,” he says.  Last spring, he was named the Frank P. Piskor Faculty Lecturer at St. Lawrence for 2008 and received a Fulbright grant for research in the relationship between ecology and literature.

“Learning a second language is a fundamental sign of respect for other cultures,” says White, whose compilation and translation into English of poems by Nicaraguan poet Pablo Antonio Cuadra, Seven Trees Against the Dying Light, will be published this fall by Northwestern University Press. “In the introduction, I study the poems in relation to the physical environment – it’s sort of a new way of looking at literature called ecocriticism,” White notes. 

In winter, White can sometimes be found speed-skating on the Rideau Canal in Ottawa.  “It’s eight kilometers of ice with real character,” White says. 

His love for the outdoors is reflected in his research.  He specializes in language, but for seven years he has studied a wide variety of ecosystems and vegetation in Latin America.

White majored in English at Williams College and received both his master’s degree and Ph.D. from the University of Oregon.  Despite his fluency in Spanish today, he did not take any classes in Spanish as an undergraduate.

In addition to teaching courses, White also helps students with independent research projects.  He encourages all of his students to take advantage of St. Lawrence’s international study programs.  “I love helping my students get the language skills they need to really take advantage of our study opportunities in Spain and in Costa Rica; there’s just no substitute for being able to learn from people in their first language,” White says.  “For me, that’s the kind of work that justifies being a teacher.”