Scott Hess, Ph.D.

About me

I teach in both the English and Environmental Sustainability departments at Earlham.  My main fields of expertise are the environmental humanities—which engages how various forms of meaning, culture, and history impact environmental and social issues—as well as 18^th– and 19^th-century British and American literature and culture.  I teach courses such as “Environmental Humanities and Social Justice”; “American Literature and Ecology,” a survey of American environmental writing in relation to a wide range of philosophical and cultural approaches to nature/ ecology; “Imagining Climate Change,” on how various forms of culture shape the ways people understand and respond to climate change; “Race, Ethnicity, and Nature in American Literature”; and “Posthumanism,” on definitions of the “human” in relation to animals, nature, aliens, monsters, technology, and artificial intelligence.  I also teach courses in 18^th– and 19^th-century British and American literature; “Reading and Writing Poetry”; and core courses for the English and Creative Writing majors such as “Foundations of Literary Study,” “Junior Research Seminar,” and the “Senior Capstone.”  I recently completed a three-year term as a member the Executive Council for the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE), the main scholarly organization in the fields of environmental literature and humanities.

On a personal level, I love to garden, grow fruit trees, and briars; cook (vegetarian); spend time with my partner and child; coach youth tennis and soccer; follow English Premier League soccer; play tennis, pickleball, and ice hockey; meditate (I’m Buddhist); watch movies; and read widely in literature, history, cultural studies, and many other fields.  Before becoming a father I also used to write poetry and play the guitar, hopefully I’ll come back to those activities again when I have more time!

Education

• Ph.D., Harvard University
• B.A., Swarthmore College

Professional memberships

• Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE)
• John Clare Society
• North American Society for the Study of Romanticism (NASSR)

Why do you teach at Earlham?

Earlham has been an almost ideal fit for me as a professor.  Earlham students want to explore how and why their learning matters, both for themselves and for the world.  They bring their whole selves to the classroom and care deeply about issues of environmental flourishing and social justice.  As a result, teaching at Earlham feels fulfilling and dynamic and continually fresh beyond what I have experienced at other colleges and universities; it is a genuinely communal exploration of how and why knowledge matters in the world.  Here the desks are always in a circle; everyone calls me by my first name; and the students and I are committed to continually expanding our minds (and hearts) together.

Research projects

My most recent scholarly book, Landscapes of Genius and the Transatlantic Origins of Environmentalism: Nineteenth-Century British and American Literary Cultures of Nature (Cambridge University Press, 2025), explores how the “genius” of 19th-century British and American authors, such as William Wordsworth, Henry David Thoreau, Frederick Douglass, Susan Fenimore Cooper, and John Muir, became associated with natural landscapes on both sides of the Atlantic.  The book demonstrates how those associations shaped both specific landscapes and the overall idea of nature in ways that precipitated the modern environmental movement.  It also explores the wider significance of “genius” in the formation of new models of nineteenth-century liberal democratic nationalist high culture, showing how authors’ relationships to landscapes and nature were shaped by race, gender, and class in ways that determined who could claim full belonging to “nature” and the nation and who could not. 

I am currently working on two future book projects: a book outlining a new relational methodology for the environmental humanities, which emerged out of my research and thinking in Landscapes of Genius; and a book on how people imagine climate change and what practical differences that imagination can make, including representations of climate change in literature, film, the visual arts, politics, scientific and non-profit organizations, and various online and social media.  My climate change research emerges from my experience teaching classes in “Climate Fiction” and “Imagining Climate Change,” as well as a public talk I gave in various locations throughout Indiana as part of the Indiana Humanities “Unearthed” Speaker Series, on “How We Imagine Climate Change and Why It Matters.”

Scholarly interest

My main scholarly field is the environmental humanities, with a focus both on the contemporary world and on 18th- and 19th-century British and American landscapes and literature.  My scholarship and teaching engage a wide range of topics including literature and environment, environmental movements and philosophies, landscape history, visual landscape arts, contemporary eco-theory such as posthumanism and the Anthropocene, and how various forms of culture and imagination shape people’s approaches to environmental issues such as climate change.  My most recently published scholarly books connect representations of nature in 18th- and 19th-century British and American literature with related developments in authorship, nationalism, print culture, landscapes, discourses of genius, and the self, exploring the significance of that history for contemporary environmentalism.

Published works

Published books

Landscapes of Genius and the Transatlantic Origins of Environmentalism: Nineteenth-Century British and American Literary Cultures of Nature (Cambridge University Press, 2025).

William Wordsworth and the Ecology of Authorship: the Roots of Environmentalism in Nineteenth-Century Culture (University of Virginia Press, 2012).

Authoring the Self: Self-Representation, Authorship, and the Print Market in British Poetry from Pope through Wordsworth (Routledge, 2005).

Published peer-reviewed articles and book chapters  

“Aotearoa New Zealand, Traditional Ecological Knowledge, and a Relational Method for the Environmental Humanities.” Romanticism and Environmental Humanities, special issue of Studies in Romanticism, edited by Noah Heringman, vol. 62, no. 1, 2023, pp. 27-35.

“Cedar Hill: Frederick Douglass’s Literary Landscape and the Racial Construction of Nature.” American Literature, vol. 93, no. 4, 2021, pp. 571-99.

“Thoreau’s Legacy for Climate Change.” The Concord Saunterer: a Journal of Thoreau Studies, vol. 28, 2020, pp. 153-84.

“Biosemiosis and Posthumanism in John Clare’s Multi-Centered Environments.” Advances in John Clare Studies, edited by Erin Lafford and Simon Kövesi, Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, pp. 199-219.

“The Romantic Work of Genius: Author, Nature, Nation and the ‘Genial Criticism’ of Samuel Taylor Coleridge.” Modern Language Quarterly (MLQ),vol. 80, no. 3, 2019, pp. 287-310.

“Walden Pond as Thoreau’s Landscape of Genius.”  Nineteenth-Century Literature, vol. 74, no. 2, 2019, pp. 224-50.

“Wordsworthshire and Thoreau Country: Transatlantic Landscapes of Genius.” Transatlantic Literature and Author Love in the Nineteenth Century, edited by Paul A. Westover and Ann Wierda Rowland, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, pp. 175-201.

“Nature and the Environment.” William Wordsworth in Context, edited by Andrew Bennett, Cambridge University Press, 2014, pp. 207-14.

“Wordsworth’s Epitaphic Poetics and the Print Market.” Studies in Romanticism (SiR), vol. 50, no. 1, 2011, pp. 55-78.

“Imagining an Everyday Nature.” International Studies in Literature and Environment (ISLE), vol. 17, no. 1, 2010, pp. 85-112.

“William Wordsworth and Photographic Subjectivity.” Nineteenth-Century Literature, vol. 63, no. 3, 2008, pp. 283-320.

“Tintern Abbey’s Environmental Legacy.” Engaged Romanticism: Romanticism as Praxis, edited by Mark Lussier and Bruce Matsunaga, Cambridge Scholars Press, 2008, pp. 82-99.

“John Clare, William Wordsworth, and the (Un)Framing of Nature.” The John Clare Society Journal, vol. 27, 2008, pp. 27-44.

“Three ‘Natures’: Teaching Romantic Ecology in the Poetry of William Wordsworth, Dorothy Wordsworth, and John Clare.” Romantic Praxis, special issue of Romantic Circles Pedagogies Commons on “Romanticism, Ecology and Pedagogy,” edited by James McKusick and Bridget Keegan, 2006, https://romantic-circles.org/pedagogies/commons/ecology/hess/hess.html.

“Wordsworth’s ‘System,’ the Critical Reviews, and the Reconstruction of Literary Authority.” European Romantic Review, vol. 15, no. 4, 2005, pp. 471-97.

“Postmodern Pastoral, Advertising, and the Masque of Technology.” International Studies in Literature and Environment (ISLE), vol. 11, no. 1, 2004, pp. 71-100.

“‘Approach and Read’: Gray’s Elegy, Print Culture, and Authorial Identity.” The Age of Johnson, vol. 13, 2002, pp. 207-37.

“The Wedding Guest as Reader: ‘The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere’ as a Dramatization of Print Circulation and the Construction of the Authorial Self.” Nineteenth Century Studies, vol. 15, 2001, pp. 19-36.

“Jousting in the Classroom: On Teaching Malory.” Arthuriana, vol. 9, no. 1, 1999, pp. 133-38.