With expertise in nineteenth-century British literature, I conduct research on the influence of environmental change and industrialization on literary narrative. In addition to an eco-formalist approach to textual analysis, my current research involves archival investigations into historical literary responses and critiques in Victorian periodicals, examining how contemporaneous reviews articulated ecological anxieties and perpetuated nineteenth-century ideologies of progress in the face of industrial and ecological catastrophe. Funded by University of Iowa dissertation fellowships, awards, and grants, my research led to article publications on the evolution of narrative structures in response to geohistorical shifts in the Victorian era. These articles have appeared in Victorian Periodicals Review and the Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies.
          My prospective book project, Reading Ecologies: Forms of Regression in Victorian Fiction, extends recent scholarship in narrative theory and nineteenth-century environmental writing to illuminate how industrial and ecological forces shaped the narrative structures of Victorian fiction. Victorian England provides a suitable background for thinking about how literary forms record ecological change, particularly the non-linear change—cataclysmic and abrupt—that we now attribute to anthropogenic climate change. Britain’s transition to fossil fuels in the late eighteenth century led to profound shifts in social relations and the Earth system, many of which were not only seen in the darkening skies and soot-covered buildings, nor even felt in the imposed abstractions of time and space, but inscribed in the narrative structures of Victorian fiction. Driving the action and producing the effects of works such as Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826), Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley (1848), Charles Dickens’s “The Signal-Man” (1866), and Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891), these forces—whether viral, industrial, or agricultural—brought the consequences of modern industry to bear on nineteenth-century readers. Scaling up from prose structure to global paradigms, I argue that, at the smallest register of form, in the complex temporal grammar of their own sentences, these texts offer us one way of encountering the overlapping frames of temporality at stake in this kind of geopolitical historicism.
          Each of the primary texts analyzed in my dissertation resists the bio-capitalist imperative to advance the plot—The Last Man’s cyclical structure staging a conflict between productive and nonproductive cycles, with the plague serving as a form of growth and advance that destroys the social and its progress; Shirley’s anticipatory framework subverting the normal passages of time through eleventh-hour character arrivals and a final chapter that, despite being titled ‘The Winding Up,’ concludes with anything but tightly-wound ending; “The Signal-Man’s” railway backdrop promising movement and speed only to deliver a storyline immobilized by spectral repetition; and Tess of the d’Urbervilles’ morally deterministic plot repeatedly stalled and disrupted by the equally deterministic forces of mechanization. In other words, each of the texts included in my dissertation refuses to supply what the modern reader—with their relentless drive toward progress, advancement, fulfillment, and pleasure—demands.
          Bridging ecocritical discourse to periodical studies, I suggest that the often-harsh reviews these texts received reveal the discomfort that Victorian readers and critics felt in their engagements with these new, challenging ecological forms. Reviewers’ overly-hostile responses were born from the fact that these works—in formally reproducing the disruptive effects of industrial capitalism—resisted standard (i.e., linear) narratives of historical and evolutionary progress. Rather than moving readers forward, these texts strung readers along, subjecting them to the same suspensions and distortions imposed by the environmental effects of industrial capitalism. By reading these reviews as indexes of growing economic and ecological anxiety, I elucidate how fossil-fueled changes in steam-travel and manufacturing, agriculture and infrastructure, reconstituted Britain’s social and geographical landscapes at the same time as they reshaped its literary and cultural landscapes, giving rise to new and correspondingly fractured forms of literary expression that Reading Ecologies attends to.
          The dialectic interplay in Reading Ecologies emphasizes this project’s commitment to interpreting narrative forms and ecological forms together; to modifying, through reading, distinctions that have long been held between social systems and the Earth system, between human history and planetary history, between aesthetic objects—nineteenth-century narratives and reviews—and the natural world. Enciphered in the pages of these literary and extra-literary texts is a very material history, composed of long durations of geomorphological alteration that have shaped not only natural landscapes—mountains, hills, plateaus, and plains—but literary landscapes—the forms and fault-lines of Victorian fiction.