A Romanticist by training, I am a generalist in practice, with special interest and expertise in pedagogy, ecocriticism, affect studies, and Anthropocene studies. Questions about emotion attract my attention: for example, what does it mean to love other species during a sixth mass extinction? And: what should we call the emotions generated by climate change? My publications explore diverse texts ranging from the 1700s to the present, including travel writing, poetry, and cli-fi.
Many of the questions I pursue grow out of the classroom, where students inspire me to inhabit new ways of reading and relating to literature and culture. Teaching also furnishes me with texts for study: as a teacher-scholar, I am fortunate to explore various periods, geographies, and genres.
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5616-6833Recent & Forthcoming Publications:
“Burnout: Cli-Fi and Exhaustion.” In Cli-Fi and Class: Socioeconomic Justice in Contemporary American Fiction, edited by Debra J. Rosenthal and Jason de Lara Molesky. U of Virginia P, 2023: pp. 32-46.
“What We Talk About When We Talk About Extinction.” Contesting Extinctions: Decolonial and Regenerative Futures, edited by Suzanne McCullagh, Luis Prádanos-Garcia, Ilaria Tabusso Marcyan, and Cathy Wagner. Rowman & Littlefield, 2022: pp. 105-122.
“The Deep Time Life Kit.” In The Anthropocene: Approaches and Contexts for Literature and the Humanities, edited by Seth T. Reno. Routledge, 2022: pp. 13-25.
“The ‘vast prison’ of the World: Feeling the Anthropocene in Wollstonecraft and Shelley.” In Gendered Ecologies: New Materialist Interpretations of Women Writers, edited by Dewey Hall and Jillmarie Murphy Clemson UP, 2019: 23-39.
“Feeling Nature, Reconsidered: Ecocriticism, the Affective Turn, and the Case of H is for Hawk.” In Affect Theory and Literary Critical Practice: A Feel for the Text, edited by Stephen Ahern. Palgrave, 2019: 235-249.
“Feeling Letdown: Affect, Environmentalism, and the Power of Negative Thinking.” In Affective Ecocriticism: Emotion, Embodiment, Environment, edited by Jennifer Ladino and Kyle Bladow. U of Nebraska P, 2018: pp. 257-278.
Wordsworth and the Green Romantics: Affect and Ecology in the Nineteenth Century. Co-edited with Seth T. Reno. U of New Hampshire P, 2016.
“Introduction: Recovering Ecology’s Affects.” With Seth T. Reno. In Wordsworth and the Green Romantics.
“Reading, Romanticism, and Affect in Environmental Education.” In Wordsworth and the Green Romantics.
“The Miseducation of Chris McCandless: Romanticism, Reading, and Environmental Education.” In Romantic Ecocriticism: Origins and Legacies, edited by Dewey Hall. Lexington Books, 2016: pp. 253-270.
On (not) Hugging Trees: Affect, Emotion, and Ecology in Wordsworth’s ‘Nutting.” Interdisciplinary Literary Studies 18.2 (2016): pp. 257-281.
“‘Shallow’ Estates and the ‘Deep’ Wild: The Landscapes of Charlotte Smith’s Fiction.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 34.2 (2015): pp. 249-272.
“Discriminating Vision: Rereading Place in Wordsworth’s Guide to the Lakes.” Prose Studies. 34.3 (2012): pp. 167-184.
Book Reviews
Review of Spectrality and Survivance: Living the Anthropocene by Marija Grech, 14 no.2 (2023).
Review of Affective Ecocriticism by Alexa Weik von Mossner. Anglia 136, no. 3. (2018): 569-573.