For Dr. Willow DiPasquale ’11M, an adjunct professor of English, her new book, “Finding the Numinous: An Ecocritical Look at Dune and The Lord of the Rings” stemmed from personal interest before it turned into an academic project.

“I was always interested in Tolkien, loved ‘Lord of the Rings’ stuff,” she explained. “My sisters read a lot of that kind of genre, so I kind of picked it up through them.”

DiPasquale had the chance to study and write about Tolkien once or twice during her undergraduate studies and focused on Frank Herbert’s “Dune” series during her master’s thesis at Arcadia. But, then she started as an adjunct professor teaching several composition and writing courses, including at Arcadia, where she has worked with Dr. Rachel Collins, assistant professor of English and director of First-Year Writing, to redesign a first year English course called: “EN 101: Thought, Expression, and Advocacy” through a CASAA Scholar-Advocate grant.

“I was teaching mostly writing courses, and that’s kind of where all my time and energy went for a little while,” DiPasquale said. “Then I enrolled in Drew University’s Arts and Letters program for my doctoral degree, so that’s where I kind of got to reconnect with the scholarship and the authors in that genre.”

Through the doctoral program at Drew, DiPasquale was given the chance to unite the worlds of Tolkien and Herbert through an environmental lens. The new book is an extension of that work, taking a look at how the characters in each series relate to the physical, natural spaces around them, how those natural spaces relate to the characters, and how nature can be seen in an almost spiritual way.

“There wasn’t a lot of scholarly work putting the two bodies of work in conversation, except for, through the years, people comparing how long and epic they are,” she explained. “But no one had really tried to break down how and why they are similar besides being very long stories. So that was also kind of an inspiring question for me to say, well I think I see a lot of similarities even though they are different genres and totally different writers and created worlds.”

DiPasquale worked with Kent State University Press to bring the book to life. In addition to looking at each series through an ecocritical lens, DiPasquale also writes in the book about how each author’s personal life influenced their writing and the worlds they created.

“It’s not out of left field for these writers to be valuing nature, and then putting that into their writing,” she said. “Both had a kind of worldview that had to do with moral choices and what responsibility we have to each other and to the world around us.”

The book will be available in late February 2025. DiPasquale hopes that it will lead to even more scholarship on the worlds of Tolkien and Herbert.

“This is just one way in which I’m comparing the writer’s works,” she said. “I imagine there’s a lot of other ways to do that – to synthesize them – and it would be great if we see more of that.”