Research
My first book, History, Abolition, and the Ever-Present Now in Antebellum American Writing examines the meaning and possibilities of the present and its relationship to history and historicity in a number of literary texts; specifically, the writings of several figures in antebellum US literary history—some, but not all of whom, associated with the period's romantic movement. Focusing on nineteenth-century writers who were impatient for social change, like those advocating for the immediate emancipation of the enslaved, as opposed to those planning for a gradual end to slavery, the book recovers some of the political force of romanticism.
Books
Moby-Dick by Herman Melville, Editor and Critical Introduction
Norton Library Edition, 2023
History, Abolition, and the Ever-Present Now
in Antebellum American Writing
Academic Articles
The New Cambridge Companion to Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Michael Jonik, forthcoming
“Carp, Mud, Poison, and Stench; or, Once Upon the Kalamazoo River”
Michigan Salvage: Bonnie Jo Campbell and the American Midwest, eds. Lisa DuRose, Ross K. Tangedol, and Andy Oler, Michigan State University Press. Forthcoming.
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"Emerson's Times"
"Emerson, Energy, Infrastructure"
The Oxford Handbook of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Christopher Hanlon, forthcoming
“Melville, Energy, and the Anthropocene"
The Oxford Handbook on Herman Melville, eds. Jennifer Greiman and Michael Jonik, forthcoming
“Looking Out Upon the Boundless Sea of the Future; or, Anticipation”
Visions of Glory: The Civil War in Word and Image Ed. Benjamin Fagan and Kathleen Diffley, U of Georgia Press, 2020
"Extraction"
The Cambridge Companion to the Environmental Humanities, eds. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Stephanie Foote, forthcoming
Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities 8.1 (Winter 2020): 139-53.
“On Dismantling: A Report from Michigan,”
Encyclopedia of Water: Science, Technology, and Society,” Ed. Patricia Maurice (Wiley, 2020), 2679-2710.
“The 2010 Marshall, Michigan Tar Sands Oil Spill”
Leviathan: a Journal of Melville Studies, 20:3 (October 2018): 25-34.
“John Paul Jones: Queer and Wild”
Time and Literature, Ed. Thomas Allen, (Cambridge UP, 2018), 180-92
"Historicism"
"Proespects for the Present"
American Literary History 26:4 (December 2014): 836-48
John Neal and Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture, Ed. Edward Watts and David J. Carlson, Bucknell UP, 2012: 57-74
“Eye-Witness to History: The Anti-Narrative Aesthetic of
Neal’s Seventy-Six”
The Limits of Literary Historicism, Ed. Allen Dunn and Tom Haddox, Knoxville, TN: U of Tennessee Press (Winter 2012): 104-23
“The Prehistory of Posthistoricism”
ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance. 56:3 (2010): 293-326
“Passing Current: Electricity, Magnetism, and Historical Transmission in The Linwoods"
“The Logic of Left Alone: The Pioneers and the Conditions of American Privacy”
Early American Literature 43:3 (Fall 2008): 605-41
“Diedrich Knickerbocker, Regular Bred Historian”
Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association (Fall 2007): 19-37
“All of us are Ahabs: Moby-Dick and Contemporary Public Discourse"
American Literary History 16:2 (Summer 2004): 179-207
“Anachronistic Imaginings: Hope Leslie’s Challenge to Historicism”
Pedagogy 3:3 (Fall 2003): 341-58
“Generational Canons”
Literature, Interpretation, Theory 12 (2001): 427-47
“Literary Popularity: Beloved and Popular Culture”
Edited Journal Issues
American Literary History Online Forum,
April 2021
"Abolition's Afterlives"
Co-Editor with John Levi Barnard, Jessica Hurley, and Stephanie Foote, joint special issues of American Literature and Resilience, a Journal of the Environmental Humanities, forthcoming Fall 2021
"The Infrastructure of Emergency"
Work-in-progress
I am currently completing a book titled Untimely Infrastructure, which is an environmental history of the 2010 Enbridge Energy oil spill into the Kalamazoo River. I am also working on a second book project about extraction and anti-extraction in U.S. literature from the 19th century to the present.
Reviews
A Question of Time, Ed. Cindy Weinstein,
American Literary History Reviews Online
“The Lives of Frederick Douglass” by Robert S. Levine,
Resources for American Literary Study 40, 2018.
“Reading Time”
(Review of Cindy Weinstein, Time, Tense, and American Literature: When is Now? Cambridge UP, 2016, Common-Place: the Journal of Early American Life 17.2.
“Art After Ahab”
(Review of And God Created Great Whales, written and performed by Rinde Eckert). Postmodern Culture 12:1 (Sept. 2001): 13 paras.