My research and teaching focus on literature, science, and aesthetics in the Victorian period and early twentieth century. My particular areas of interest include nineteenth-century sciences of mind and emotion; aestheticism and decadence; and speculative and science fiction. I also write about topics in the environmental humanities including extinction, energy cultures, and the literary history of climate change.
My current book project, In Human Scale: The Aesthetics of Climate Change, asks how art and literature try to bring long and vast processes of ecological devastation into human frames of reference. One of the imaginative problems we confront in the era of climate change is that although global warming, ocean acidification, and extinction are happening extremely quickly at a geological time scale, these disasters look slow or distant from our human perspective. My project argues that this scalar disjuncture originates with British industrialization and earth sciences, and shows how literary and cultural forms like the naturalist novel, utopian literature, the panorama, or decadent aesthetics developed formal strategies for fusing human and inhuman scales of time and space.”
