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Laura Dassow Walls

Education

Areas of Specialization

Curriculum Vitae [PDF]

Recently Taught Courses

ENGL 285 Themes in American Literature: "Freedom and Obedience, Liberty in Chains"
ENGL 383 Romanticism
ENGL 420 American Literature to 1830
ENGL 421 American Literature 1830-1860
ENGL 429 Fictions of Science
ENGL 490 Apes and Angels: Evolution and Revolution in 19th-Century Literature
ENGL 744 American Romanticism
ENGL 750 The American Novel to the Civil War
ENGL 841 Special Topics: The American Transcendentalists
ENGL 841 Special Topics: Exploration and Empire in 19th-Century America
ENGL 841 Articulating And: Literature, Science, Theory

Professional Accolades

Comments on The Passage to Cosmos:

"Laura Dassow Walls leads the reader on a fascinating, breathless chase after the explorer-naturalist who anticipated planetary ecology and inspired both Darwin and Thoreau. Alexander von Humboldt was a pioneer environmentalist whose sympathies crossed nations, races, and cultures; his friendships included Jefferson and Goethe, Simón Bolívar, Moses Mendelssohn, and John C. Frémont. Walls's book bridges the worlds of science and the humanities with learning and sensitivity."

- Daniel Walker Howe, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848

"This searching, panoramic study of the polymathic Alexander von Humboldt's career and astonishingly diverse impact on his American progeny should be required reading for all students of nineteenth-century U.S. literary, cultural, and environmental history."

- Lawrence Buell, Harvard University

"Laura Dassow Walls's book is a multidimensional living cartography of Alexander von Humboldt's fascinating life, work, and legacy today. Written in an elegant, truly Humboldtian spirit, it rediscovers the man who was called the second discoverer of America, opening up a new, brilliant chapter in the long (although not continuous) history of Humboldt's presence in the United States."

- Ottmar Ette, University of Potsdam

"A major contribution to the field. Rediscovering Alexander von Humboldt, Laura Dassow Walls gives us a thinker rooted in the nineteenth century and speaking to the twenty-firsopposed to colonialism on ecological grounds, and bringing together literature and science to develop a vision of world justice."

- Wai Chee Dimock, Yale University

"The publication of this superbly written book is one of those rare events that changes an entire field of study. Not only does Laura Dassow Walls show that Alexander von Humboldt is inescapably central to an understanding of nineteenth-century American literature, she also shows how, despite C.P. Snow's contention and our own current assumptions, science and literature were for a time the most powerful of allies in America. For anyone interested in American thought and literature The Passage to Cosmos is a beautiful and necessary book."

- Robert D. Richardson, author of Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind, Emerson: The Mind on Fire, and William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism.

Awards

Current Research Projects

My work braids together the variously intertwined and oppositional strands of nature, culture, and discourse in the early nationalist period of US America. My most recent book, Passage to Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America (Chicago 2009), helped me to work through several problems I have seen with traditional literary criticism of this period:

First, the separation of literature from science hobbles our understanding of both by buying into modernist ideologies that write science out of culture and nature out of literature. "Science" as the professional encoding of knowledges about nature and "literature" as the triumph of subjectivity over the natural world are settlements that must both be questioned if we are to move beyond Cartesian dualisms into the chaotic and resistant natural world of the 21st century. All three of the writers I have studied intensively - Thoreau, Emerson, and Humboldt, two Americans and a German - suggest that normative science formed in the 19th century after, and at least in part as a result of, a disciplinary agreement between humanist critique and scientific power that arose in early nationalism.

Second, that this disciplinary agreement is situated in early nationalism is no coincidence; it is a function of the emerging nation's need to create and bind an imagined community. Hence I have become increasingly interested in the national narratives of historians (Prescott, Parkman, Adams) as well as of literary artists (Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, Poe, Melville, James Fenimore Cooper, Susan Cooper), all of whom inflect their work through the politics and poetics of exploration science.

Third, the fact that nationalism is the condition for "American Romanticism" intertwines US American literature to global (political) and planetary (geonatural) currents, in ways that thread through individual literary careers and the very process of canonization itself.

My work both stands inside disciplinary boundaries (I focus primarily on literary texts, broadly conceived), and reaches toward inter-, even trans-, disciplinarity. Understanding the formation of the "two cultures," literature and science, requires the weaving together of multiple disciplines without reducing any one to the terms of another. Currently I am at work on two projects: the first is a theoretical excursion that explores the ways literary texts weave humans and nonhumans together; this will, I hope, help bridge ecocriticism with science studies and with mainstream of literary criticism. Second, since nothing is more profoundly interdisciplinary than an individual life lived with intensity in the fullness of the world, I am exploring the possibility of using the life, times, and writing of Thoreau as a lens to trace networks of knowledge and authority as they accrete through individual choices and actions. I hope to develop in this way a "literary historical ecology." I believe the greatest challenge faced by literary studies today is the need to overcome the dualism implicit in criticism and theory between a reified "nature," assumed to belong to "science" hence of only marginal interest, and an equally reified "culture" which somehow is imagined to be exempt from "nature." Given the evidence everywhere around us that such dualisms have entirely collapsed, we urgently need to rewrite this settlement if literary studies are to thrive in the 21st century.

Selected Publications

Books Authored
Books Edited
Journals Edited
Selected Articles

Recent Presentations

Other Information

Laura Dassow Walls is currently on the editorial boards of ESQ, NEQ, and Humboldt im Netz and chairs the MLA Executive Committee of the Division of Literature and Science. She has served on the boards of the Thoreau Society and the Emerson Society, and on the editorial boards of Isis (History of Science Society) and The Concord Saunterer. She is a member of MLA, the Thoreau Society, the Emerson Society, the History of Science Society, the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts, and the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment. She has served as adviser for several film projects and is featured on screen in "Wilderness Men: Alexander von Humboldt, Natural Traveller" (2000), directed by Peter Nicolson and available through BBC Video.

Featured on "Book TV," C-SPAN, reading from Passage to Cosmos, Virginia Festival of the Book, aired March 18, 2010. Watch the session here Visit Site

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