Bio

I teach courses in nineteenth-century U.S. literature and culture and the environmental humanities at Washington University in St. Louis, where I am the Lynne Cooper Harvey Distinguished Professor of English and Professor of Environmental Studies (Courtesy Affiliation). Previously, I taught at Penn State (2003-2025). I received my Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 2002 and my B.A. from Princeton University in 1995.

My scholarship focuses on the Arctic humanities, oceanic and polar studies, book history and material text studies, Herman Melville, and nineteenth-century prose. I am particularly interested in historical sailors and their literary cultures—that is, in communities of knowledge formed in ecological margins. The curiosity that drives much of my scholarship is about how knowledge practices are challenged by environmental extremes. In recent years I have become both participant in and observer of shipboard literary communities: I have made a half-dozen expeditionary research trips to the Arctic and Antarctica.

I have edited a new edition of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick for Oxford World’s Classics (2022), which has been featured on BBC Radio and a three-part Freakonomics series. 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. 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. My other editorial work includes a volume of essays entitled Turns of Event: American Literary Studies in Motion (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016) and a special issue of Atlantic Studies on "Oceanic Studies." I am a frequent contributor to Avidly, a channel of the Los Angeles Review of Books. Most recently, in collaboration with Candace Jensen and Jacinda Russell, I have co-edited a special issue of Regeneration: Environment, Art, Culture, “On The Cold Edge,” and co-curated a companion exhibition at the Amos Eno Gallery in Brooklyn of art and writing from our Arctic expeditionary residency aboard a tall ship.

I was a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow (2019-2020), and my work has also been supported by fellowships and grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, 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. I participated in the 38th Voyage of the Charles W. Morgan, the world's last surviving wooden whaleship, and joined the NSF-supported 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.

I am a founder of C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, and served as C19 President (2016-2018). I am past president of the Melville Society, and have held leadership positions in the Penn State Institute for the Arts and Humanities, Center for American Literary Studies, and Polar Center. 

I am at work on three new book projects: Polar Erratics: In and Out of Place in the Arctic and Antarctica, about polar ephemerality; a rereading of Larry McMurtry’s novel Lonesome Dove under contract with Columbia University Press; and a short book about the lexicon of seamen.

In December, 2021 I reached the semifinals of the first-ever Jeopardy! Professors Tournament.