Ashton Nichols
Ashton Nichols
The Walter E. Beach ’56 Distinguished Chair
in Sustainability Studies
Department of English, Dickinson College
Blogs & Websites:
Urbanature, August 2008-present
Thoreau, Wilderness, and American Nature Writing, January 2009-
A Day in the Life of the Digital Humanities (2009)
Dickinson in the Galapagos (2002-03)
Links to Selected Class Syllabi on the Web:
English 403: Thoreau and American Nature Writing . . . . . . .Fall 2013
First-Year Seminar: Thoreau and American Nature Writing . Fall 2013
English 404: Senior Thesis: Critical Writing Workshop. . . Spring 2011
English 360: Ecocriticism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Spring 2011
English 101: Small Poems, Big Ideas. . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . .Spring 2011
English 370: Romantic Orientalism and Its Critics. . . . . . Spring 2010
English 101: British and American Nature Writing. . . . . . Spring 2010
English 220: Critical Approaches and Literary Methods . . . Fall 2009
English 379: Thoreau, Wilderness, American Writing . . Spring 2009
English 403: Frankenstein and Other Romantic Monsters . Fall 2008
First-Year Seminar: The Myth of Frankenstein . . . . . . . ..Fall 2007
English 404: Senior Critical Writing Workshop. . . . . . . Spring 2004
English 403: Revolutionary Romanticism . . . . . . . . . . . . .Fall 2003
English 101: Romantic Natural History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Fall 2003
English 101: Romantics and Victorians. . . . . . . . . . . . . . Fall 2001
English 212: Writing About Nature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Fall 1999
English 399: Wordsworth and Hardy in Hyperspace . . . . Fall 1996
Link to “Thomas Hardy’s World”
Link to Selected Essays on the Web:
1) “Thoreau and Urbanature: From Walden to Ecocriticism” Neohelicon: Actos Comparationis Literarum Universarum 36:2 (December 2009): 347-55 Budapest: Springer, 2009
2) “Romantic Ecomorphism,” “Ecomorphism and Ecoromanticism,” “Wilding and Roosting,” “Romantic Natural History,” “Emerson and Infinity,” “Urbanature.” Romantic Circles Invited Blog Posts, with Tim Morton (UC-Davis) and Kurt Fosso (Lewis and Clark). Thematic Thread: Ecocriticism, 9-12/2008. [http://www.rc.umd.edu/blog_rc/]
3)“Roaring Alligators and Burning Tygers: Poetry and Science from William Bartram to Charles Darwin”
(from The Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 149:3 2005 )
4)“The Loves of Plants and Animals: Romantic Science and the Pleasures of Nature”
(from Romantic Circles Praxis Series on “Romantic Ecology,” November 2001)
5)“Romantic Rhinos and Victorian Vipers: The Zoo as Nineteenth-Century Spectacle”
(from A Romantic Natural History: 1750-1859)
6)“The Anxiety of Species: Toward a Romantic Natural History”
(from The Wordsworth Circle 28:3 (1997): 130-36)
7)“Hyping the Hypertext: Scholarship and the Limits of Technology”
(Loyola University Chicago electronic publications, October 1996)
Publications with Additional Web Links:
Beyond Romantic Ecocriticism: Toward Urbanatural Roosting (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011)
“Nichols offers a provocative new approach to understanding the role of humankind in a post-natural, post-industrial world. Grounded in a perceptive reading of Romantic natural history, this book moves beyond the conventional nature-versus-culture dichotomy toward a more inclusive concept of ‘urbanatural roosting.’ Along the way, Nichols makes important contributions to our scholarly understanding of British Romantic poetry, American environmentalism, and the history of science.”—James C. McKusick, author of Green Writing: Romanticism and Ecology
“Ambitious, learned, experimental, and thoroughly readable, Beyond Romantic Ecocriticism posits ‘urbanatural roosting’ as a vital twenty-first-century mode of ecological thinking. Perhaps this is what the Chinese might call the ‘tian ren he yi’ (the harmonious unity of the universe and man) of the new millennium. An inspired (and inspiring) book!”—Scott Slovic, editor of ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment
“Part lyrical memoir, part literary and cultural history, part philosophical meditation, Nichols’ compelling new book is above all an eloquent, erudite, and impassioned manifesto for a new way of thinking, writing, and living more self-consciously, equitably, and sustainably on this earth. Stressing both the historicity of ‘wilderness’ and the naturality of the city, Nichols envisages the collaboration of scientific knowledge, urban design and the artistic imagination in the crafting of thriving ‘ecomorphic’ townscapes as part of a wider practice of sharing and caring for all of earth’s diverse, yet all more or less humanized places and spaces.”—Kate Rigby, Monash University and author of Topographies of the Sacred: The Poetics of Place in European Romanticism
Romantic Natural Histories: William Wordsworth, Charles Darwin and Others (Houghton Mifflin, 2004)
The Revolutionary “I”: Wordsworth and the Politics of Self-Presentation (Macmillan / St. Martin’s, 1998)
The Poetics of Epiphany: Nineteenth-Century Origins of the Modern Literary Moment (Alabama, 1987)
“Mumbo Jumbo: Mungo Park and the Rhetoric of Romantic Africa,” Romanticism, Race, & Imperial Culture (Indiana, 1996)
“Face to Face with Wild Dophins,” Sea Stories: An International Journal of Art and Writing (2006-07)
“In the field there is an animal,” “Open Season,” and “Animate Nature”: poems in Terrain and Best of Terrain (2002)
Current Research:
A Romantic Natural History: 1750-1859:
A website designed to survey literary and natural history resources from the century before Charles Darwin
Curriculum Vitae (C.V.): Courses, Publications, Presentations
Return to the Dickinson College English Department Home Page
Send an e-mail message to nicholsa@dickinson.edu