I am an Assistant Professor of English and the Dr. William R. Hammond Endowed Professor in Liberal Arts at the University of Louisiana Monroe. At Duke University, I was awarded the 2018 Dean’s Award for Excellence in Teaching, served as the editorial assistant for American Literature, and successfully defended my dissertation, Manifesting Vertical Destiny: Geology, Reform, and the Stratified Earth in American Literature, Long Nineteenth Century, written under the direction of Priscilla Wald and Michael D’Alessandro, in 2019. At ULM, I was named the 2024-25 Honors Faculty of the Year and my book project, Looking Downward: Geological Reformations in 19th-Century American Letters, received the Award to Louisiana Artists and Scholars (ATLAS) grant.
This website presents my Statement of Teaching Philosophy hyperlinked with illustrative documents. With an educational background in English and geological sciences, I teach a variety of courses, including environmental humanities, American literature, science-and-literature studies, professional writing, and science writing. At Duke, I taught a wide range of courses, from surveys of American and environmental literature to first-year and advanced composition. In 2016, I traveled to Duke Kunshan University, China, to introduce Mainland Chinese students to Thoreau’s writings in a course called “Walden International: Analyzing Thoreau Across Cultures” (see the course website “Walden Alive” ). My scholarly work focuses on the intersection of literature and science in American culture of the long nineteenth century, and has appeared in American Literature, Nineteenth-Century Prose, American Literary Realism, and The Pocket Instructor: Literature (Princeton University Press). My scholarship on the intersection of geology and American literature can be found in The Oxford Handbook of Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature, and the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Henry David Thoreau. An article translating my geology-and-literature research for the classroom by teaching students how to write imaginatively within and across the humanities and sciences is published by Princeton University Press in The Pocket Instructor: Writing.
