Writing Samples
Here you will find samples of various writing projects I undertook as a master's student. Many of these writing samples are currently in the process of submission, and therefore only a small abstract has been made publicly viewable. To request access to these, please contact me.
Merwin Studies Article:
"Silence and the Lyric-Epic: Merwin’s Hybrid Ecopoetics in The Shadow of Sirius."
This forthcoming paper examines the relationship between the ancient silver mines at Laurium, just outside of Athens, and the formation of Plato’s Hekademia, located just outside of the city walls.The relationship between the sacred land of the Hekademia, and the environmental writings of Plato have largely remained unexplored, though much has been written unearthing mining practices and their contribution to the fall of the Roman Empire. This paper will explore to what extent the rhetoric of Roman environmentalism contributed and benefited from mining practices, and how these practices helped to destabilize the political and ecological stability of the polis.
Interdisciplinary Studies
in Literature and Environment
Book Review
“Wilderness into Civilized Shapes: Reading the Postcolonial Environment.” By Laura Wright. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2010.
Sacred Gardens, Profane Tailings: An Examination of Hyperobjects in Ancient Roman Environmental Rhetoric
(Paper Forthcoming)
Shadow and Liminal Space in Typee and Walden
Biographer R.D. Richardson notes, in Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind, that not only was Thoreau reading Typee during his stay at Walden Pond, but that the novel also “makes it clear that primitivism is an account not so much of how the South Sea Islanders live, as it is of how modern European man thinks the islanders live, because he himself yearns for an earlier, simpler life” (220). With the thematic similarities between Typee and the Walden Pond experiment, it only stands to reason that these two texts should perform such similar stylistic, psychological, and philosophical functions and that critics would have a such a difficult time placing either into a single genre of writing [Click Here For Abstract]. or [Contact Me] for access to the complete essay.
Southern Humanities Review
Book Review
“Beyond Romantic Ecocriticism: Toward Urbanatural Roosting.” By Ashton Nichols.
“Those who have no difficulty seeing God as the expression of our human dreams and desires nonetheless have trouble recognizing that in a secular age Nature can offer the same sort of mirror” —William Cronon
Awarded Auburn's English Department "2012 Best Essay by an MA Student Award" and a competitive George Mills Harper Fund Travel Grant to attend the 2013 SAMLA Conference.