Arthur F. Thurnau & Valerie Traub Collegiate Professor of English; Professor, Program in the Environment
About
I am a Professor in the Department of English and the Program in the Environment at the University of Michigan. My research and teaching address this broad question: how have the making of races, environments and environmental knowledge occurred in overlapping ways since European colonization of the Americas began—and how have various media been enjoined to produce and question this process? My first book, American Curiosity: Cultures of Natural History in the Colonial British Atlantic World (UNCP, 2006), which looked at letters, specimens, and the cross-racial American encounters they drew from, recast the scientific enlightenment in its actual Atlantic and colonial dimensions. This book won both Phi Beta Kappa’s Emerson Award and the Jamestown Prize. My next book, The Flood Year 1927: A Cultural History (Princeton UP, 2017), examined how the most devastating, and publicly absorbing, US flood of the twentieth century took on meaning as it moved across media platforms, across sectional divides and across the color line. It was awarded the MLA's James Russell Lowell Prize (Honorable Mention) and the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment’s biennial book prize (Honorable Mention) and translated into French (CNRS, 2019).
