Research

As a researcher my work engages in cultural analyses of the scientific concepts through which humans relate to the environment, and especially, to environmental crisis. I work at the intersection of US literary and cultural studies, science studies/history of science, and the environmental humanities more broadly.

Current Project

Frank Thone, “Are we creating an American sahara?” Evening Star, 12 August 1934, p. 6, Library of Congress.

A Drought with No End: The Cultural Life of Desertification

A Drought with No End engages in a chronological examination of changing cultural approaches to desertification in the US from the 1930s Dust Bowl to our contemporary moment in four chapters which alternate focus on desertification in policy and popular literary forms. Tracing the development and utilization of desertification within US science, policy, and popular culture enables an analysis of the discursive functioning of this idea, which I argue is key to understanding its pervasiveness. My project offers a unique contribution to existing scholarship on desertification as the first substantial work on the topic from a literary and cultural lens. At the same time, my project also serves to bridge existing scholarship on desertification with the burgeoning sub-discipline of the desert humanities, as well as the environmental humanities more broadly.

Publications

Articles and Book Chapters

"Combatting Desertification and Narrating Environmental Crisis in the United Nations” in Storied Deserts: Re-Imagining Global Arid Lands, ed. Celina Osuna and Aidan Tynan, Routledge, 2024, pp. 157-175.

“Frank Herbert’s Ecology, Oregon’s Dunes, and the Postwar Science of Desert Reclamation.” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, vol. 30, no. 3, 2023, pp. 637-656.

“’Today we are going to look at clouds as perhaps we have never looked at them before’: Understanding Rachel Carson's View of the Sky” in Silver Linings: Clouds in Art and Science, ed. Dolly Jørgensen and Finn Arne Jørgensen, Museumsforlaget, 2020, pp. 82-90.

Book Reviews

“All the Wonder that Would Be: Exploring Past Notions of the Future by Stephen Webb.” For Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction, vol. 48, no. 1, Spring 2019.

“Winds of Change: Short Stories about Our Climate Edited by Mary Woodbury.” The Goose, vol. 15, no. 1, 2016.

Other Writing/Public Scholarship

“An Interview with Dr. Brenda Vellino,” Climate Commons Blog, 8 Apr. 2021

“The Ecologies of Postwar Hard Science Fiction and Where to Find Them.” MOSF Journal of Science Fiction, vol. 4, no. 1, July 2020, pp. 20–21.

“Frank Herbert’s Ecology and the Science of Soil Conservation.” Network in Canadian History & Environment, 24 Apr. 2020

“Interview with Visiting Scholar Kyveli Mavrokordopoulou,” Climate Commons Blog, 3 Oct. 2018

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