I received my PhD in English in 1995 from the University of Michigan, came to the University of Iowa the following year, and have been here ever since with two brief faculty exchanges at the Université de Montpellier.  My recent scholarship and teaching explore the intersections of literary and environmental history, particularly of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.  I am also a co-PI on a project that applies methods of computational linguistics and geographical information science to the study of historical textual corpora.