Professional Appointments
Professor of English, Affiliate of the Institute for the Environment and Sustainability, and Affiliate of American Studies, Miami University of Ohio, 2014 to present
Assistant Professor of English, Texas Tech University, 2009-2014
Education
Ph.D., English, University of California, Irvine, 2009
M.A., English, University of California, Irvine, 2004
B.A., English, summa cum laude, Boston University, 2001
Books
Coral Lives: Literature, Labor, and the Making of America (Princeton University Press, 2023).
Liquid Landscape: Geography and Settlement at the Edge of Early America (University of Pennsylvania Press 2018).* Winner of the 2019 Rembert Patrick Award and the 2019 Stetson Kennedy Award from the Florida Historical Society.
Peer-reviewed essays
“Emerson Undersea.” Co-authored with Dominic Mastroianni. The Oxford Handbook of Ralph Waldo Emerson (2024).
"Antebellum Coral." American Literature 91.2 (2019): 263-293.
"Island Nation: Mapping Florida, Revising America." Early American Studies 11.2 (2013): 243-271.
"Liquid Landscape: Possession and Floridian Geography." Early American Literature 47.1 (2012): 89-114.
other essays
“Climate change is destroying reefs, but the effects are more than ecological.“ The Conversation. September 5th, 2023.
“Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Florida.” In Once Upon a Time in Florida: Stories of Life in the Land of Promises. Edited by Jacki Levine. University of Florida Press (forthcoming, November 2023). Originally published as “Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Florida” in FORUM: The Magazine of the Florida Humanities Council (Fall 2019): 42-45.
Review of Magnificent Decay: Melville & Ecology, by Tom Nurmi. Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies 24.1 (2022): 93-96.
“Gulf of Knowledge: The Hidden Scientific History of the Early American Southeast.” Book review essay, Cameron B. Strang’s Frontiers of Science: Imperialism and Natural Knowledge in the Gulf South Borderlands, 1500-1850 (UNC Press, 2018). Southern Spaces (May 2019).
”Coral, Labor, Slavery, and Silence in the Archives.” Age of Revolutions, “Revolutionary Material Cultures” Essay Series (April 22, 2019).
"A Book Full of Seaweed." Huntington Frontiers Magazine. (Spring/Summer 2018): 8-12.
Fellowships, Honors, and Awards
See above, “Grants & Awards”
selected interviews
“Reader Spotlight: Michele Navakas on the Cultural History of Coral,” Library Company Blog (2019).
“America’s Erstwhile Coral Obsession,” Shelf Life, a Newberry Library Podcast (2018).
Interview on Liquid Landscape, Ideasphere with Guy Rathbun, KCBX (NPR), San Luis Obispo (2017).
”A Brief History of Florida’s Landscape,” Gulf Coast Live with Julie Glenn, WGCU (NPR), Fort Myer
Full CV available upon request.