Undergraduate

Broadly conceived, I am interested in the interrelated issues of race, the environment, and epistemology in the Atlantic world from 1492 up through the twentieth century, with a particular emphasis on the plantation zones.  My early work involved a study of the Anglophone transatlantic networks and rhetorics of knowledge production around nature in the Americas, up to the time of the American Revolution.  I have recently written articles on such Anglo-Atlantic figures as William Byrd II, Robert Beverley, John Gabriel Stedman, and Richard Ligon.  My current book-length project is titled "Noah's Kin: Southern Flooding and American Modernity." It is a cultural and environmental history of the most publically engrossing American flood of the twentieth century: the Mississippi Flood of 1927.  Not only was it foundational to the literary careers of Richard Wright and William Faulkner, a node in the journalistic careers of W.E.B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells, Walter White and H.L. Mencken, and a signal event in the histories of Vaudeville and Blues music, but it also gave public urgency to questions about North-South relations, the status of African Americans, Federal environmental stewardship, and the very nature of nature.  

American Curiosity: Cultures of Natural History in the Colonial British Atlantic World (OIEAHC/UNCP, 2006).  Winner of the Jamestown Prize for 2005 and Phi Beta Kappa's Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize for 2006.

“Zora Neale Hurston and the Environmental Ethic of Risk” in eds. Joni Adamson and Kimberly Ruffin, American Studies, Ecocriticism, and Citizenship: Thinking and Acting in the Local and Global Commons with an Introduction by Philip Deloria (Routledge Press, 2013).

 

“Embodying African Knowledge in Colonial Surinam: Considering Two William Blake Engravings in Stedman’s 1796 Narrative” in eds., Agnes Lugo-Ortiz and Angela Rosenthal, Slave Portraiture in the Atlantic World (1599-1889) (Cambridge UP, 2013). 

 

“Faulkner and the Outer Weather of 1927,” American Literary History 24.1 (March 2012) special issue entitled “Sustainability in America.”

 

“Science, Nature, Race” in eds., Nicholas Canny and Philip D. Morgan, The Oxford Handbook of the Atlantic World, 1450-1850 (Oxford, UK: Oxford UP, 2011; paper 2013).