Michele Navakas

My research has been supported by grants and awards from several foundations and institutions including the Fulbright US Scholar Program, the Beinecke Library at Yale, the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Library of Congress, and the Huntington Library. Before joining Miami’s faculty I taught at Texas Tech University. I received my B.A. in English from Boston University and my Ph.D. in Literature from UC Irvine (2009).

I am a Professor of English, Co-Director of the Literature Program, and Affiliate of the Institute for the Environment and Sustainability at Miami University of Ohio where I specialize in American literature to 1900, environmental humanities, and race and material culture. My books include Coral Lives: Literature, Labor, and the Making of America (Princeton University Press, 2023) and Liquid Landscape: Geography and Settlement at the Edge of Early America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), which won two book awards from the Florida Historical Society. Presently I am at work on a new book about the ecologist Rachel Carson. Tentatively titled Rachel Carson Reading, it examines Carson’s immersion in the literature of the long nineteenth century (c. 1789-1914) and charts the increasingly endangered relations between ecology and literary study.