Laura Dassow Walls

Professor,

John H. Bennett, Jr. Chair of Southern Letters

Office: 519 Humanities Office Building
(803) 777-2308
wallsld@mailbox.sc.edu

Education

Ph.D., Indiana University, 1992

Specialization Areas

• American Transcendentalism, especially Emerson and Thoreau
• Cross-Atlantic Romanticism
• Literature and Science
• Alexander von Humboldt
• Environmental Literature and Ecocriticism

Recent Courses

See Course Descriptions for detailed information.

• 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
• SCCC 475: 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 Transcendentalists
• ENGL 841: Special Topics: “Exploration and Empire in 19th-Century America”

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: Humboldt’s American Horizons (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; reading Thoreau, then Emerson, then Alexander von Humboldt in the context of 19th-century science has convinced me that “science” as the professional encoding of knowledges about nature is a settlement that must be questioned if we are to understand the origins of environmental writing. All three of these writers, two Americans and one German, suggest that normative science formed in the 19th century after, and as a result of, a disciplinary agreement between humanist critique and scientific power that arose in early nationalism for a complex of ideological reasons.

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.

Interdisciplinary projects are difficult to track without setting boundaries, and nothing is more fundamentally interdisciplinary than individual careers. In my next major project I am experimenting with deliberately 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 survive the 21st century.

Selected Publications

Books and Edited Volumes

The Passage to Cosmos: Humboldt’s American Horizons. University of Chicago Press, publication scheduled for July 2009. 500+ mss. pages, illustrations.

The Oxford Guide to Transcendentalism. Ed. with Joel Myerson and Sandra Petrulionis. New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2009. 600+ pp.

The Journal of Henry David Thoreau, Vol. 9. Co-editor with Wesley T. Mott. Princeton University Press; publication scheduled for 2010.

Material Faith: Thoreau on Science. Editor and author of "Introduction: The Man Most Alive" (ix-xviii). NY: Houghton Mifflin, 1999. Pp. xviii + 120.

Seeing New Worlds: Henry David Thoreau and Nineteenth-Century Natural Science. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995. Pp. xiii + 300; bibliography, index.

Nineteenth-Century Prose, Special Walden Sesquicentennial Issue. Co-edited with Sandy Petrulionis. 31.2 (Fall 2004). Pp.+ 273.

Journals Edited

Selected Articles

“Ralph Waldo Emerson and Coleridge’s American Legacy.” Coleridge’s Afterlives, 1834-1934. Ed. James Vigus and Jane Wright. Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming 2008.

“’Every Truth Leads to a Power’: Emerson, Faraday, and the Minding of Matter.” Emerson in the 21st Century, Barry Tharaud, Editor. Book mss. presently under consideration at Oxford University Press.

"Seeking Common Ground: Integrating the Sciences and Humanities." Coming into Contact: Explorations in Ecocritical Theory and Practice. Ed. Annie Merrill Ingram et al, Georgia University Press, 2007: 199-208.

"Exploring the World." Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, vol. 4, ed. Ken Haynes. Oxford University Press, 2006: 498-504.

"Science." American History through Literature, 1820-1870, ed. Janet Gabler-Hover and Robert D. Sattelmeyer. Charles Scribner's Sons, 2006: 1036-1045.

"'If Body Can Sing': Emerson and Victorian Science." Emerson Bicentennial Essays. Ed. Ronald A. Bosco and Joel Myerson. Massachusetts Historical Society/University of Virginia Press, 2006: 334-366.

"'As Planets Faithful Be': The Higher Law in Emerson's Anti-Slavery Lectures." Nineteenth-Century Prose 30.1-2 (Spring-Fall 2003): 171-194.

"'Hero of Knowledge, Be Our Tribute Thine': Alexander von Humboldt in Victorian America." The Natural Legacy of Alexander von Humboldt, ed. Joerg-Henner Lotze. Alexander von Humboldt's Legacy and Its Relevance for Today. Northeastern Naturalist vol. 8, Special Issue No. 1 (2001): 121-34.

"Romancing the Real: Thoreau's Technology of Inscription." A Historical Guide to Henry David Thoreau, ed.William E. Cain. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000: 123-51.

"Believing in Nature: Wilderness and Wildness in Thoreau's Science." Thoreau's Sense of Place: Essays in American Environmental Writing, ed. Richard Schneider. Iowa City, Iowa: University of Iowa Press, 2000: 15-27.

"Consilience Revisited." ebr [Electronic Book Review] (December 27, 1999): http://altx.com/ebr/ebr10/10wal.htm

"The Anatomy of Truth: Emerson's Poetic Science." Configurations: A Journal of Literature and Science. 5.3 (Fall 1997): 425-61.

"Chains of Translation: On Being a Pacific Thoreauvian." American Studies of Scandinavia 29.1 (1997): 1-17; also Nordlit 1 (1997): 223-40.

"Textbooks and Texts from the Brooks: Inventing Scientific Authority in America." American Quarterly 49.1 (March 1997): 1-25.

"Walden as Feminist Manifesto." ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment. 1.1 (1993): 137-44.

"'The Napoleon of Science': Alexander von Humboldt in Antebellum America." Nineteenth-Century Contexts 14 (1990): 71-98.

Selected Presentations

“The Passage to Cosmos: Humboldt on Humans and Nature.” Chicago Summit, Center for Humans and Nature, Libertyville, Illinois,
June 6-7, 2007.

“Trembling on the Verge of Science: Thoughts of an English Professor.” Last Lecture series, University of South Carolina, March 7, 2007.

“’Every Truth Leads to a Power’: Emerson, Faraday, and the Minding of Matter.” Transatlanticism in American Literature: Emerson, Hawthorne, Poe. Oxford University, UK, July 15, 2006.

“The Solar Eye of Science: Transcendentalism’s New Copernican Revolution.” Wake Forest Kenan Lecture Series, Feb. 24, 2005; STS Colloquium, MIT, March 14, 2005.

"Humboldt's Cosmos and the Birth of the Two Cultures." Plenary Speaker at Alexander von Humboldt: From the Americas to the Cosmos. City University of New York, Oct. 14-16, 2004.

"Bridging the Two Cultures." Keynote speaker, in debate with E. O. Wilson, at biennial conference of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, Cambridge, MA, June 6, 2003.

"'If Body Can Sing': Emerson and Scientific Naturalism." Invited speaker at the Emerson Bicentennial Celebration, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, Mass., April 24-26, 2003.

"The Cosmos in the Local." Keynote speaker at "Draining the Great Oasis," environmental history conference held at Southwestern State University, Marshall, Minnesota, October 25, 2001.

"Thoreau's Wild Fruits: Towards a Moral Ecology." Paper delivered at the annual conference of the American Society for Environmental History, Durham, N.C. March 28-April 1, 2001.

"A Material Faith: Thoreau and Science." Lecture at the Concord Museum as part of the "Cultivating Self/Cultivating Nature" 1999-2000 lecture series, sponsored by the Thoreau Institute, Concord Museum, and Thoreau Society. Concord, MA, April 6, 2000.

"Is 'Literature and Science' Historical?" Session organized for Society for Literature and Science, Norman, Oklahoma, October 9, 1999; and History of Science Society, Pittsburgh, Nov. 6, 1999. Presented "Consilience Revisited, or, Why Should a Thoreauvian Read Whewell?"

"Chance and Design: Founding the Emerson Light and Power Company." Chair and presenter, Conference for the Society of Literature and Science, Gainesville, Florida, Nov. 5-8, 1998.

"A Material Faith: Thoreau and the Science of Life." Invited speaker at the Boston University Colloquium on the Philosophy of Science. November 12, 1998.

"Chains of Translation: On Being a Pacific Thoreauvian." Lecture presented at symposium, Writing and a Sense of Place, by invitation of the University of Tromsö, Norway, August 15-18, 1996.

Chair and organizer, "No Longer Entirely Modern: Translating Pure Science and Hybrid Bodies." Session for the Conference of the Society for Literature and Science, New Orleans, Nov. 1994. Presented "Ecstatic Science, Gnomic Sayings: The World in a Word."

"Thoreau and Romantic Science." Fiftieth Anniversary Celebration of the Thoreau Society, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Worcester, MA, July 1991.