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Welcome to my personal homepage. I am Professor of English at Baylor University (Waco, Texas), specializing in nineteenth-century British literature. From 2014 to 2021, I served as the Margarett Root Brown Chair in Victorian Studies at Baylor’s Armstrong Browning Library. My previous research and publications centered on nineteenth-century British poetic form, religion, and print culture. Since 2019, my work on literature and religion has prioritized environmental issues, examining intersections between nineteenth-century British poetry, ecology, and religion. In conjunction with undergraduate program leadership and grant-funded projects described below, I have also become invested in contributing to scholarship on interdisciplinary environmental education, particularly community-engaged learning that involves students in pursuing local environmental justice. This constellation of concerns has shaped talks at conferences, universities, and the United Nations, as well as journal articles and book chapters, and my next book project, The Body of Christ, The Body of the Earth: Nineteenth-Century Poetry, Ecology, and Christology.
I want to encourage scholarship whose formation and content respond to our present environmental crises and injustices. We need new forms of creating knowledge and intellectual community that are lighter on the earth and that lower financial barriers to participation, especially when budgets are shrinking for scholarship in the humanities. I have therefore contributed to a series of experiments in flightless, carbon-reduced, multi-site conferencing. In Sept. 18-21, 2019 I organized a conference on “Ecology and Religion in Nineteenth-Century Studies.” The conference digitally interlinked events held at five universities in the US and UK and also reached audiences online around the world. My “Publications, Grants, and Professional Activities” page includes information about this and other conferences I have directed. Most recently, I pursued my commitment to more sustainable conferencing by joining Prof. Dino Felluga (Purdue), Dr. Chris Adamson (Dakota State U), Monica Wolfe (Purdue), and a large international team of scholars to organize EVENT 2024, a flightless conference in 2024 on the theme “Event” that combined virtual sessions and interactions throughout the year with in-person conferences at seventeen hubs on four continents in September 2024. Through a platform first developed for this conference, COVE Conferences, participants across the world pursued asynchronous, multimedia conversation about papers and materials presented at digital sessions and in-person hubs. In the end, 905 attendees joined us for EVENT 2024, which was jointly sponsored by the North American Victorian Studies Association (NAVSA), the British Association for Victorian Studies (BAVS), the Australasian Victorian Association (AVSA), the Victorians Institute (VI), and DACH Victorianists (DACH-V). Click here to visit the conference website.
Since 2022, I have led initiatives in interdisciplinary environmental education at my university, Baylor, striving to ground such education in active learning and service in our home city, Waco. Baylor is at an epicenter of food and environmental injustice: diverse communities ringing the university face poverty and food insecurity rates nearly double that of the state of Texas, and according to the EPA are in the most vulnerable categories for food-driven health threats and risks from weather events propelled by climate change, including flooding and fire. Even so, leaders and community members in these challenged neighborhoods are innovating and creating solutions to food justice, environmental regeneration, and climate resilience. I have been working alongside others to bridge the gap between these inspiring leaders and communities and Baylor’s educational mission. With the support of a University Teaching Exploration Grant from the Academy for Teaching and Learning, I formed a team of faculty across campus to create a new minor in Environmental Humanities at Baylor. This interdisciplinary minor explores how nature and human cultures interact, asking how our participation in the living world is bound up—for good or ill—with storytelling, the arts, media, worship practices, historical legacies, philosophies, politics, social structures, and economic priorities. Drawing classes from over 20 programs across the university, the Environmental Humanities Minor involves students in digging into the cultural, social, and material roots of environmental vitality and distress while taking local action through community-engaged learning, preparing them for diverse paths of care, activism, and advocacy. Through engaged learning courses and student projects in partnership with frontline communities, we are co-creating solutions to food and environmental justice in Waco. Centers of activity include the Baylor Community Garden and partnership with the Sustainable Community and Regenerative Agriculture Project (SCRAP). I am on the SCRAP coordinating team, and our work has been supported by several grants, including a $300,000 matching grant from the Funders Network and Cooper Foundation in 2023-2024, and, most recently, a $17.9 million EPA Community Change grant (2025-2027) held in partnership with local nonprofits and the City of Waco.
Please see my “Publications, Grants, and Professional Activities” page for further information about my publications. You can read more about my book, Imagined Spiritual Communities in Britain’s Age of Print(Ohio State University Press, 2015), by visiting the webpage linked to the title. It is in Ohio State’s Literature, Religion, and Postsecular Studies book series. For the same series, I coedited a collection with Winter Jade Werner titled Constructing Nineteenth-Century Religion: Literary, Historical, and Religious Studies in Dialogue (May 2019). The “Publications” page also lists my recent and growing work in nineteenth-century literary, religious, and environmental studies.
In 2010, I founded Baylor’s 19th C. Research Seminar to which I still contribute (please click to visit the website for more information). Since 2018, I have helped to coordinate the Religion and Spiritualities Caucus for the North American Victorian Studies Association.