My essays have appeared in American Literature, Early American Literature, Early American Studies, Forum: The Magazine of Florida Humanities, and Huntington Frontiers Magazine, and my research has been supported by grants and awards from several institutions including 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, Affiliate of the Institute for the Environment and Sustainability, and Affiliate of American Studies at Miami University of Ohio where I specialize in American literature to 1900, environmental humanities, and race and material culture.
I am the author of Coral Lives: Literature, Labor, and the Making of America (Princeton University Press, summer 2023) and Liquid Landscape: Geography and Settlement at the Edge of Early America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), winner of two book awards from the Florida Historical Society. Presently I am at work on a new book project, tentatively titled Rachel Carson Reading, which examines Carson’s immersion in the literature of the long nineteenth century (c. 1789-1914) and charts broader relations between ecology and the rise of American literary studies.