Dr. Timothy Bintrim

Education

• B.A. and M.A., Slippery Rock University (1988 and 1990)
• Ph.D. in American Literature, Duquesne University (2004)

Biography

I teach first-year writing (themed Writing about Science), sophomore Medicine in Literature, Women and Literature, and the two-part, sophomore American Literature Survey. In the recent past, I have taught first-year and senior seminars titled “Wolves, Whales, Bears, and Cougars: Megafauna in Literature,” “Nature Green in Tooth and Claw: Environmental Utopias and Dystopias,” and “Radical Sustainability.” Each semester, one of my classes stocks the therapeutic gardens at Maple Heights Rehabilitation Center with ornamentals and vegetables that students have grown from seed and cuttings in our high hoop greenhouse.

My scholarship focuses on the writings of Willa Cather, a novelist associated with Nebraska, though she lived in Pittsburgh from 1896-1906 and spent long working vacations there through 1915. I have published a dozen essays on topics such as homicidal wolves, office heists, Easter Egg rolls, newswomen, Chinese missionaries, and dandies in Cather’s writing--all with connections back to Pittsburgh--and in 2021 co-edited the essay collection Willa Cather’s Pittsburgh in the University of Nebraska’s Cather Studies series. In 2025, I became one of the editors of The Willa Cather Review (based in Red Cloud, Nebraska), and, in 2026, I joined the Board of Governors of the Cather Foundation. I have co-directed three academic conferences on Cather, two in Pittsburgh at Duquesne U, (1996 and 2017), and most recently, the 71st Spring Conference in Red Cloud in 2026.

In 2022, I observed documentary filmmaking by serving as an editorial assistant to Charles “Chip” Kaufmann on his project This Collapse of All Things: The Short Life of Fred A. Demmler, Artist. Cather taught Fred Demmler and his brothers at Allegheny High School. He became a promising portrait painter before his death in Belgium during the last weeks of the war. In addition to being interviewed about Cather and Fred, I got to drive around Pittsburgh with the cameraman filming out the car window and assist with interviews with art collection curators, cemetery historians, and Demmler family members around Pittsburgh. The film is now in post-production: https://www.facebook.com/FredADemmler.

The SFU English program promotes early professionalization, providing students with opportunities to publish and present their scholarship and creative writing at academic conferences. To accomplish these ends, we faculty accompany our majors and Honors students to at least two conferences each year and help students revise for publication. I have mentored four students who presented their original research at the Willa Cather Spring Conference in Red Cloud. One published two co-written essays in the Willa Cather Review.

Meeting philanthropist Stan Brock (founder of Remote Area Medical) got me interested in the critical need for universal health care in America, especially dental care. For the last decade I have accompanied a team of volunteers from SFU to at least one free clinic a year, usually MOM-PGH, Pittsburgh’s dental mission of mercy. For fifteen years I have co-advised the Environmental Action Society, SFU’s outdoors club. For a dozen years I have served on the Pre-Professional Committee that interviews our pre-medical, dental, and veterinary students and helps them prepare their applications.

Academic & Professional Specializations

• Willa Cather's Pittsburgh writings
• American literature
• Environmental literature
• Archival studies

Teaching Interests

• Medicine in literature
• Disability in literature
• Western Pennsylvania women writers
• Literature about wild animals and plants