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Thomas W. Howard

I am a PhD candidate in American literature at Washington University in St. Louis. I specialize in nineteenth-century American literature, and I am particularly interested in American pragmatism, cognitive literary studies, and science studies.

My dissertation, "Pragmatic Ambiguities: Aphoristic Thinking in the American Nineteenth Century," discusses a particular stream of thought among nineteenth-century nonfiction authors, especially Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, William James, and W. E. B. Du Bois, who use aphorism to engage readers in a never-ending process of interpretation. This project is also multinational in scope, covering German authors, like Friedrich Nietzsche, and Asian religion. For more information on my current research projects, click here.
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I am currently on a Fulbright research grant in Germany. I am being hosted by the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies, part of Freie Universität Berlin.

View my current CV here.

Upcoming Events

4-7 March 2021, Bergen, Norway: I will present the paper "Thoreau's Radicle Empiricism: Arboreal Encounters and the Posthuman Forest" at the annual conference for the European Society for Literature, Science & the Arts.

7-11 April 2021, virtual: I will present the paper "Thoreau's Arboreal Encounters: A Transatlantic Re-Vision" in a panel sponsored by the British Association of Nineteenth-Century Americanists (BrANCA) at the British Association for American Studies conference, which will be wholly online due to COVID-19.

November 2021, Granada, Spain (postponed from 2020 due to COVID-19​): I will present the paper "Thinking Like a Tree: Human Cognition and Speculative Forest Thinking" at the Biennial Conference of the European Association for the Study of Literature, Culture and Environment, entitled Transcreations: Creaturely Encounters as Cultural Artefacts.