Research and Teaching Interests
My general focus is on nature and culture: I wander through parks, cemeteries, and wilderness areas (often with my kids), stare at landscape paintings and photographs, and re-read Thoreau, all in an effort to figure out how ideas about nature have changed over time and how those changes have mattered in the western world. My primary appointment is in the History department, but my Ph.D. is in American Studies, and I remain fully committed to interdisciplinary work. In my graduate teaching, I regularly work with students not only in History but also in English, Science and Technology Studies, History of Architecture, Anthropology, and Natural Resources. On the undergraduate level, I teach courses ranging from an overview of environmental history to seminars on consumerism, the American West, the meanings of wilderness, and the road trip in American culture.

Another strong interest is in creative writing, and I happily serve as the faculty sponsor of a radical underground organization called Historians Are Writers, which brings together Cornell graduate students who believe that academic writing can actually be moving on a deeply human level. I also seek to support innovative history writing through a book series at Yale University Press, called New Directions in Narrative History (John Demos and I are the co-editors).

At Cornell, I’m also the founder and coordinator of the Cornell Roundtable on Environmental Studies Topics (CREST), which holds lunchtime events on campus and also sponsors evening sessions where we discuss relevant books and articles that we’ve read in common. And I’m currently serving as a house fellow at Flora Rose House on West Campus, where you’ll sometimes see me at the dining hall, trying to lasso my three young children as they attempt to lure unsuspecting undergraduates into a food fight.