Writings on nineteenth century environments​

Ecological Formalism, or, Love in the Ruins [​with Nathan K. Hensley]
Introduction to Ecological Form: System and Aesthetics in the Age of Empire

​Ecological Form is about how we might think about the nineteenth century—about how we need to do so—as we come to terms with a damaged and seemingly diminished present. What can the Age of Coal tell us about the Age of Man? ... And in what ways does the legacy of extractive imperialism in the nineteenth century continue to shape experience now?

Signatures of the Carboniferous: The Literary Forms of Coal [with Nathan K. Hensley]
In Ecological Form: System and Aesthetics in the Age of Empire

This chapter revises existing accounts of Victorian mediation by locating what is arguably the signal cultural form of the nineteenth century—the novel—within the global energy system that increasingly made it possible.... Our aim in this deliberately constrained experiment in reading for coal is to offer a test case in adducing how the practices and infrastructures of fossil combustion became legible as literary effect.

Writings on empire, culture, and political economy

On Systematic Colonization and the Culture of Settler Colonialism: Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s A Letter from Sydney (1829)
BRANCH: Britain, Representation and Nineteenth-Century History.

In its wide-reaching political and cultural impacts, Wakefield’s A Letter from Sydney constitutes the entry point to what might be called, after Lauren Goodlad, a Victorian settler-colonial “geopolitical unconscious.” A Letter from Sydney and the project of systematic colonization illuminates the deep urge of the Victorians to remake the world in their own image, as well as the global exchanges and imaginaries that helped shape the culture of metropolitan Britain.

Gold and Greater Britain: Jevons, Trollope, and Settler Colonialism
Victorian Studies

Operating alongside and in conjunction with vast movements of the population and transfers of capital, Greater Britain’s textual dimension is characterized by the formal complexities that arise from the clash of metropolitan and colonial concerns across discontinuous imperial spaces.

The Romance of Uneven Development: Geography, Capitalism, and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Globalized Pacific
Victorian Literature and Culture

These novels represent a concerted attempt to describe the workings of an emerging form of imperial expansion driven more by multinational forms of financial speculation than national political interests.

Writings on twentieth century New Zealand

Colonial Ecologies: Guthrie-Smith’s Tutira and Writing the Settled Environment.” A History of New Zealand Literature