About

I teach courses in nineteenth-century U.S. literature and culture and the environmental humanities at Penn State University, where I am Professor of English. My scholarship focuses on oceanic and polar studies, book history and material text studies, Herman Melville, and nineteenth-century prose.

I have edited a new edition of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick for Oxford World’s Classics (2022). My most recent monograph, The News at the Ends of the Earth: The Print Culture of Polar Exploration, was published by Duke University Press (2019) and was a finalist for the Ecocritical Book Award from the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment. In it I examine polar expeditionary newspapers and other forms of knowledge that circulate geophysical and climatic extremity, both in the age of polar exploration and in our current moment of climate change and polar resource extraction. An open access version of the book is available thanks to PSU and the TOME initiative.

My first book, The View from the Mast-Head: Maritime Imagination and Antebellum American Sea Narratives (University of North Carolina Press, 2008), received the John Gardner Maritime Research Award. My critical edition of Horrors of Slavery, William Ray's 1808 Barbary captivity narrative, appeared from Rutgers University Press in 2008. I edited a special issue of Atlantic Studies on "Oceanic Studies" and a volume of essays entitled Turns of Event: American Literary Studies in Motion (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), and co-edited a special issue of the Journal of Transnational Studies on “Archipelagoes, Oceans, and American Visuality.” I am a frequent contributor to Avidly, a channel of the Los Angeles Review of Books.

I was a recent John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow (2019-2020). My work has also been supported by fellowships and grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities (including a 2014-2015 NEH Fellowship), the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh, Seed Box Environmental Humanities Collaboratory at Linköping University in Sweden, the Mellon Foundation, the American Philosophical Society, the Library Company of Philadelphia, the Huntington Library, the John Carter Brown Library, the Bibliographical Society of America, the Newberry Library, the National Humanities Center, and the American Antiquarian Society, in which I was elected to membership in 2013. In July, 2014 I participated in the 38th Voyage of the Charles W. Morgan, the world's last surviving wooden whaleship, and in July 2019 I joined the Northwest Passage Project, an Arctic expedition tracking climate change. A documentary, Frozen Obsession, was made of the expedition, for which I served as Arctic historian. I ventured to Antarctica with Albatros Expeditions, and traveled to the International Territory of Svalbard in October 2022 with The Arctic Circle residency program.

I am a founder of C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, and served as C19 President (2016-2018). I was the 2015 President of the Melville Society, and have served as the Associate Director of the Penn State Institute for the Arts and Humanities from January 2012-June 2013; previously, I was the Director of the Center for American Literary Studies (2007-2010; interim director spring 2016). In the fall of 2015 I served as the interim Co-Director of the Penn State Polar Center. 

I am at work on two new book projects: Polar Erratics: In and Out of Place in the Polar Zones, about the temporalities of polar humanities scholarship, and Castaways, a meditation on "female Robinson Crusoes." In December, 2021 I reached the semifinals of the first-ever Jeopardy! Professors Tournament.