Fire-Works on the Night of the Fourth of July, 1868. Winslow Homer. Wood engraving; The Cleveland Museum of Art.
2025-2030
Every Atom Weeps
Energy, Race, and Resistance
in the Federal Theater
(In progress)
An examination of four unpublished plays by writers of the Federal Theatre Project (1935-39) that positions them against the afterlives of slavery and intensification of coal, oil, and turpentine…
Waylaid Light
The Physics of American Literature
1850-1900
(In progress)
Waylaid Light highlights representations of energy in nineteenth-century U.S. literatures alongside the transatlantic development of modern physics, roughly 1850-1900, including fascicles by Emily Dickinson…
Uranium Cadillac
Energy Imperialism & the Work
Indigenous Literatures
(In Progress)
Uranium Cadillac considers how various twentieth-century indigenous North American writers (e.g., Silko, Ortiz, Alexie, and Harjo) articulated and resisted energy imperialism in the American nuclear West.…
Robert James Mann, The Philosophy of Reproduction (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longman, 1855), p. 52.
Melville and Reproduction
Routledge Companion to Herman Melville
(Forthcoming 2027)
This chapter looks at Melville’s investigations of reproduction and related terms like generation and offspring through a reading of “The Tartarus of Maids” that opens fresh perspectives on, for example, the biopolitical relationships between sexual reproduction and textual reproduction…
George Sowerby, “Illustrations of Cryptophialus minute” from Charles Darwin, A monograph on the sub-class Cirripedia (1854).
Barnacle Theory
Melville Extracted
Edinburgh University Press
(Forthcoming 2027)
Not much has been written about barnacles and other arthropods in Melville’s work, but this chapter argues that barnacles index, in fresh and unusual ways, Melville’s relationship to nineteenth-century scientific concepts like evolution and extinction as well as the bioarchival…
Geological Society of America. (1845). The Quarterly journal of the Geological Society of London (Vol. 24, Issue 1).
Quarry of Thought
Emerson & AI
The Dial 3.1
2026
What can Emerson teach us about artificial intelligence? Today we recognize that large language models and intensive computing systems like AI are indexical technologies used to capture knowledge and harvest user data from boardrooms to classrooms…
“A Turpentine Dipper at Work, Florida” (1910) [Alachua County Historic Trust: Matheson History Museum Digital Collections, The University of Florida] (https://ufdc.ufl.edu/MH00000522/00001/images)
Turpentine Postcard
Regeneration:
Environment, Art, Culture Journal
(In progress)
In the nineteenth-century, pine forestry took place in what were known as “turpentine orchards” first in the Carolinas then across the Southern pine forests from Florida to Texas, usually by slave labor…
Emily Dickinson, J1233 (1872). [Emily Dickinson Archive]
To Chalk the Sun
Emily Dickinson’s Solar Poetics
(Chapter 1 of Waylaid Light)
(In progress)
Seeing with Emily Dickinson – through her struggles with her vision , her relationship with the science of light, and her recurrent references to the sun – reveals a solar unconscious that structures her poetic practice…
Image from Prometheus, dir. Ridley Scott (20th C. Studios, 2012).
Cautionary Stones
Cinema, Infrastructure &
the Necropolitics of Waste
(In Progress)
A look into the dark prism of contemporary cinema for lessons on living and dying in the Anthropocene, Cautionary Stones explores a number of films produced between 2007 and 2017 to index the transformations of imperial logic and fascistic…
2020-2025
Image: Sicario, dir. Denis Villeneuve (Lionsgate, 2015)
Sicario
Film-Philosophy 29.3
Edinburgh University Press
(2025)
Denis Villeneuve’s borderland thriller Sicario (2015) is a film of our time. A paranoid thriller with an imperial unconscious, its affective textures of excitement, threat, and fear at once disguise and hint at the deeper story that the film…
Opening shot from The Master (2012), dir. P.T. Anderson
Melville’s Foams
Oxford Handbook of Herman Melville
2nd edition
(2025)
This chapter examines some of Melville’s strangest imagery: the marginal, seemingly unremarkable descriptions of the frothy, scummy, slimy conditions at the boundary between life and non-life, animate and inanimate. Getting dirty with…
“Wild Rose.” Mary Altha Nims (American, 1817-1907). Watercolor; The Cleveland Museum of Art.
Verdure
Blackwell Companion to Herman Melville
2nd edition
(2022)
Although it might strike modern readers as awkward or archaic, the word verdure appears in nearly all of Melville’s major works. From the “universal verdure” of Typee to the “enlocking” ground-vines of Weeds and Wildings…
2015-2020
Magnificent Decay
Melville & Ecology
University of Virginia Press (2020)
Reviewed in:
Choice Reviews (Assn. College Research Libraries, 2021)
Nineteenth-Century Contexts (Taylor & Francis, 2022)
Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies (JHUP, 2022)
Nineteenth-Century Literature (U California Press, 2023)
What is Melville beyond the whale? Long celebrated for his stories of the sea, Melville was also fascinated by the interrelations between living species and planetary systems, a perspective informing his work in ways we now term “ecological”...
Detail from “Skeleton,” The Penny Cyclopaedia of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (London: C. Knight, 1833-43), (22:73).
Mineral Melville
J19: Journal Nineteenth-Century Americanists 7:1
(2019)
This essay recovers Melville’s long-neglected novel Mardi, arguing that it is an essential text for understanding Melville’s relationship to nineteenth-century science…
Sam Francis, “The Whiteness of the Whale” (1957), oil on canvas. Albright Knox Gallery.
Melville among the Philosophers
Bloomsbury Publishing
(2017)
For more than a century readers have found Herman Melville’s writing rich with philosophical ideas, yet there has been relatively little written about what is philosophically…
Wilbur H. Siebert, “Routes of the Underground Railroad: 1830-1865,” The Underground Railroad from Slavery to Freedom (New York: Macmillan Company, 1898),13.
Shackle, Sycamore, Shibboleth
Cartographies of Exile: A New Spatial Literacy
(2016)
Few escaped slaves had ever seen a map. In Life and Times (1881), Frederick Douglass noted that slaveholders “sought to impress their slaves with a belief in the boundlessness of slave…
John Brown (Library of Congress: LC-USZ62-106337), head-and-shoulders portrait, reproduction of 1850s photograph (c1899).
Shadows in the Shenandoah
Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies 17:3
(2015)
Melville’s poem “The Portent” presents readers with a haunted vision of the divided American landscape before and during the Civil War…
Image from The Wire, Season 1 (HBO)
Wallace’s Choice
The Wire in the College Classroom
(2015)
Of the many characters tangled in Avon Barksdale’s web in Season One of The Wire (2002), an empathic sixteen year-old named Wallace…
Frederic Edwin Church, “The Natural Bridge, Virginia” (1852). Oil on canvas.
Body/Land
Polymath: Interdisciplinary Journal 3:1
(2012)
Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia (1787) is a work of both geography and political philosophy. It provided Jefferson…