During my PhD years at Indiana, I was able to combine my continuing interest in the life sciences with the study of language and literature, culminating in a dissertation supervised by Cary Wolfe. Many of the ideas I developed in that work went into my book, Environmental Renaissance, which tries to do a number of things: provide an introduction to social systems theory and cybernetics; reevaluate several canonical American literary texts from the perspective of environmental philosophy; castigate the current state of ecocriticism; and exhume Thoreau’s brain using concepts from cognitive science and poststructuralism. I also find the time to talk about bottled minnows, huckleberries, Al Pacino, and Saturn (the car company, not the planet). I regularly teach courses on environmental discourse, as well as rhetorical criticism, new media, and semiotics, the latter a field I studied at Indiana under the polymath Thomas Sebeok. Other areas in which I have opinions but limited expertise include superheroes, weather, hockey, pumpkins, swords and sorcery, farming (dairy and ant) graphic design, bricolage, false consciousness, catastrophes (esp. world-ending), argufying, fish-mongery, and soup (theory and practice).

Selected Publications

"Critical Ecologies: Ten Years Later.” Electronic Book Review, December 2006. (http://www.electronicbookreview.com)

"Management and Ignorance.” Environments. 30 (3). 2003.

Environmental Renaissance: Emerson, Thoreau, and the Systems of Nature. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2003.

"'In Their Own Language': Sarah Orne Jewett and the Question of Non-human Speaking Subjects.” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment. Winter, 1999. 51-63.

Fellowships & Awards

UW Learning Initiatives Fund Grant ($11, 600), 2005
UW SSHRC Grant ($5000) 2002
Canada Foundation for Innovations Co-recipient ($217,000), 2001

Current Research

I like interdisciplinary work because it helps us avoid what Kenneth Burke called “trained incapacity,” which is a kind of blindness associated with being deep but not very wide. Despite the risks, we should step outside of the metaphors and narratives that form our intellectual safe zones as often as we can. My current research has the working title, The New Physiocracy, and my interest here is to think through the latest discourses of information and fabrication technologies as they collide with the older discourses of nature and ecology. Some of my most recent publications related to this project can be found at the online journal Electronic Book Review, where I served for a time as the editor of its Critical Ecologies stream. I’m also interested in new media and, with my colleague Katherine Acheson, I’ve been working on a series of projects that analyze and model strategies for conducting scholarly argument using multimedia.

Areas of Graduate Supervision

Environmental rhetoric and/or literature
Genres of professional writing
New media theory and design
Nineteenth century American literature
Semiotics and discourse analysis