Studium

My scholarly work examines phenomena that are alien and intimate at once. My research on the cultural functions of monsters has held especially wide impact, leading to a stint as an expert witness on a copyright lawsuit involving the Pixar film Monsters Inc., numerous podcasts (including Radiolab) and other media, and a wide range of scholarly books and essays. My first publication Monster Theory is a collaborative project exploring monsters as invitations across time to a widened world. After nearly three decades the book remains in print and has been used in classrooms across the world as an entryway to cultural studies and critical analysis. In spring 2027 Monster Theory Returns will be published by the University of Minnesota Press, with twenty-six fresh contributions and a reworked introduction.

Trained as medievalist and working in Old and Middle English, Latin, Old Icelandic and French, I have also long researched and published in the environmental humanities, with a special emphasis on how knowledge from the past can propel the imagining of more humane futures. I am a founding member of the MLA Forum on Ecocriticism and Environmental Humanities and former co-president (with Stacy Alaimo) of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment, the largest and oldest organization for environmental humanities worldwide. My research has been generously funded by fellowships from the ACLS and the Guggenheim Foundation, My book Stone: An Ecology of the Inhumanwas awarded the 2017 René Wellek Prize in comparative literature and investigates the active and abiding companionship of a substance that only seems to be inert. Research for this book brought me around the world: Salisbury Plain, London, Paris, Barcelona, Berlin, Victoria Australia, Bordeaux, and Iceland. A spur to numerous collaborations with artists and scholars across the globe, Stone was recently translated into German, with a Russian translation currently underway.

With planetary scientist Lindy Elkins-Tanton I co-wrote a book called Earth, about the stakes as well as the perils of thinking about the planet as an object viewable from its exterior. With Lowell Duckert I edited the collection Elemental Ecocriticism, which brings together ecotheorists with medieval, early modern and contemporary disciplines to rethink the possibilities offered by supposedly outmoded knowledge and stories. The book extends the collaborative investigation of more-than-green ecologies and active materialities instigated by Prismatic Ecology: Ecotheory Beyond Green and continued in a third volume at the same press, Veer Ecology: A Companion for Environmental Thinking, with thirty-one contributors ranging across disciplines and periods. Veer Ecology was a finalist for the ASLE prize in Ecocriticism (2018). With environmental humanities scholar Stephanie Foote I co-edited The Cambridge Companion to Environmental Humanities, an overview of the field that emphasizes the intimacy of environmental study to ecological activism. Collaboration is an essential value of mine; academia too often focuses, to its detriment, on the solitary and the heroic.

With Julian Yates I wrote Noah’s Arkive (University of Minnesota Press, 2023). The project re-examines the master myth for the narration of climate change and argues against the attenuated versions we tend to repeat whenever we imagine a future of rising seas and drowned peoples, uncovering instead a rich and millennia-long counter history in which Noah’s resignation to an ark of exclusion and limited preservation is questioned, rethought, rebuked, rebuilt. My most recent project is called Monster Theory Returns and will be published in early 2027.

Books

Noah's Arkive. Co-authored with Julian Yates. University of Minnesota Press, 2023.

Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman. University of Minnesota Press, 2015. Winner of the René Wellek Prize for best book in comparative literature, 2017. Translated into German, 2023. Russian translation forthcoming.

Earth. Co-authored with planetary scientist Lindy Elkins-Tanton. Bloomsbury (Object Lessons series), 2017.

Hybridity, Identity and Monstrosity in Medieval Britain: Of Difficult Middles. Palgrave Macmillan, New Middle Ages series, 2006.

Medieval Identity Machines. University of Minnesota Press, Medieval Cultures series, 2003.

Of Giants: Sex, Monsters, and the Middle Ages. University of Minnesota Press, Medieval Cultures series, 1999.

Monster Theory Returns. University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming spring 2027. Editor.

The Cambridge Companion to Environmental Humanities. Cambridge University Press, 2021. Editor, with Stephanie Foote.

Veer Ecology: A Companion for Environmental Thinking. University of Minnesota Press, 2018. Editor, with Lowell Duckert.

Elemental Ecocriticism: Thinking with Earth, Air, Water, and Fire. University of Minnesota Press, 2015. Editor, with Lowell Duckert.

Prismatic Ecology: Ecotheory Beyond Green. University of Minnesota Press, 2013. Editor.

Cultural Diversity in the British Middle Ages: Archipelago, Island, England. Palgrave Macmillan, New Middle Ages series, 2008. Editor.

Thinking the Limits of the Body. State University of New York Press, Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art series, 2002. Editor, with Gail Weiss.

The Postcolonial Middle Ages. Palgrave, New Middle Ages series, 2000. Editor.

Becoming Male in the Middle Ages. Garland Publishing, New Middle Ages series, 1997. Editor, with Bonnie Wheeler.

Monster Theory:  Reading Culture. University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Editor. Translated into Spanish, Portuguese and Hungarian.