I am interested in the way that places\u00a0change over time and the ways that writers reckon with and represent these changes. \u00a0I am also interested in how literary representations of\u00a0human engagement with the natural world\u00a0in turn exert positive and negative pressure on the environment.<\/p>\n
My scholarship makes use of the tools of \u00a0literary studies, religious studies, and environmental studies to consider sources and objects from the nineteenth century through the nineteen-forties (or the Civil War to World War Two, or American Romanticism through High Modernism). \u00a0As an ecocritic, I hope that my scholarship and my teaching can contribute in some small way to the tandem projects of making our relationship to our environment more sustainable and our relationships to each other more just.<\/p>\n
My current book-length project is provisionally titled “Making the Bloom Desert: Nineteenth-Century \u00a0American Writing and the Desolation of the Holy Land.” \u00a0It argues that a few nineteenth century writers – chief among them, Mark Twain – desolated the Holy Land literarily, not literally, and that this literary desolation contributes to the region’s contemporary political and environmental problems. \u00a0The project recovers other, less famous\u00a0British, American, Jewish, Israeli, and Palestinian\u00a0writers’ accounts of the Holy Land to show that Twain’s characterization of the desolation of the land is not exactly the “truthful treatment of material” that we might expect from the most prominent American realist.<\/p>\n
I have also just begun work on creative non-fiction project that is probably best described as an environmental history of Stoughton, Wisconsin. \u00a0For this project, I\u00a0combine archival research with\u00a0field work (hiking and skiing the fields, forests, and marshes\u00a0just beyond Stoughton’s\u00a0limits) to try to understand the corner of Dane county where I have chosen to settle.<\/p>\n
Articles and Book Chapters<\/strong><\/p>\n “The Field is Ripe: Christian Literary Scholarship, Post-Colonial Ecocriticism, and Environmentalism,”\u00a0Christianity and Literature<\/em>\u00a065.3 (2016).<\/p>\n “Mark Twain\u2019s\u00a0The Innocents Abroad<\/i>, the\u00a0Survey of Western Palestine<\/i>, and the Desolation of the Holy Land” in\u00a0Transatlantic Literary Ecologies<\/em>, ed. Kevin Hutchings and John Miller. \u00a0Routledge, 2017 <\/b>“T.S. Eliot, Architecture, and Historic Preservation” in The Edinburgh Companion to\u00a0<\/em>T.S. Eliot and the \u00a0Arts,\u00a0<\/em>ed.\u00a0Frances Dickey and John Morgenstern. Edinburgh UP, 2016.<\/p>\n “The Problem of the Prodigal in The Fair Maid of the West, The Renegado,<\/em> and A Christian Turned Turk<\/em>”\u00a0in Renascence<\/em> 64.4 (Summer 2012).<\/p>\n “Herman Melville’s\u00a0Clarel<\/em>” in\u00a0Christian-Muslim Relations: A Bibliographical History 1500-1900<\/em>\u00a0(Brill)<\/p>\n “Mark Twain’s\u00a0The Innocents Abroad”\u00a0in<\/em>\u00a0Christian-Muslim Relations: A Bibliographical History 1500-1900<\/em><\/em>\u00a0(Brill)<\/p>\n Book Reviews<\/strong><\/p>\n Rev. of\u00a0Landmarks<\/em>\u00a0by Robert Macfarlane and\u00a0Uncommon Ground<\/em>\u00a0by Dominick Tyler,\u00a0Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment<\/em>\u00a023.1 (Spring 2016).<\/p>\n Rev. of Textual Intimacy: Autobiography and Religious Identities<\/i> by Wesley A. Kort, a\/b\u00a0<\/i>Auto\/Biography Studies<\/i>\u00a030.2 (Fall 2015).<\/p>\n Rev. of \u2018Anglo-Catholic in Religion\u2019: T.S. Eliot and Christianity <\/i>by Barry Spurr, Christianity and Literature<\/i> 61.2 (Winter 2012).<\/p>\n Recent and Upcoming Conference Presentations<\/strong><\/p>\n “Preaching Climate Action to the Choir:\u00a0Odds Against Tomorrow <\/em>and the Possibilities of Religious Language,” ASLE Biennial Meeting, Detroit, Michigan, 2017.<\/p>\n “The New British Nature Writing: Macfarlane, Macdonald, and Jamie,” International Conference on Ecopoetics in Perpignan, June 2016<\/p>\n “Postcolonial Pastoral in Raja Shehadeh\u2019s Palestinian Walks,”<\/i>\u00a0ASLE Biennial Meeting, Moscow, Idaho, June 2015<\/p>\n “By the Quad and On the Ground: Mapping Home at 1:24,000” contribution to Bioregionalism peer seminar at ASLE Biennial Meeting,\u00a0Moscow, Idaho, June 2015<\/p>\n Works in Progress<\/strong><\/p>\n “Enchantment as Wonder in The New Nature Writing: Macfarlane, Macdonald, and Jamie,” in Dwellings of Enchantment: Writing and Reenchanting the Earth,<\/em> ed.\u00a0B\u00e9n\u00e9dicte Meillon.<\/p>\n “St. Louis 1905 and T.S. Eliot’s Loss of Faith” [article in progress]<\/p>\n “Making the Desert Bloom: Nineteenth-Century American Writing and the Desolation of the Holy Land” [monograph project]<\/p>\n \n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I am interested in the way that places\u00a0change over time and the ways that writers reckon with and represent these changes. \u00a0I am also interested in how literary representations of\u00a0human engagement with the natural world\u00a0in turn exert positive and negative … Continue reading
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