Statement

I work on nineteenth-century American literature and culture with particular research interests in New England Transcendentalism, history of science (especially evolutionary discourse), environmental writing, and "place studies."

Publications

Recent publications include, Norton Critical Edition of Henry D. Thoreau, Walden, Civil Disobedience, and Other Writings, 3rd ed. (W.W. Norton, 2008); "Evolutionary Theory" in The Oxford Handbook of Transcendentalism, ed. Joel Myerson, Sandra Harbert Petrulionis, and Laura Dassow Walls (Oxford, 2010); "Performing Loss, Elegy, and Transcendental Friendship," New England Quarterly 81 (2008); “Thoreau’s Multiple Modernities,” in Thoreauvian Modernities: Transatlantic Conversations on an American Icon, ed. François Specq, Michel Granger, and Laura Dassow Walls (Georgia, 2013), and, with John T. Lysaker, Emerson and Thoreau: Figures of Friendship (Indiana, 2010). 

Teaching

I teach courses at all levels of the English curriculum, including lower- and upper-division undergraduate courses in American and environmental literature as well as graduate seminars.  Among those recently taught: