Publications

Abstract:

Anesthetics like ether and nitrous oxide were popular medical and recreational drugs in the nineteenth century, but, I argue, they also formed the basis of a distinctive interpretive practice. Reading “under the influence” brought the affective resonances of a text to the fore while disrupting logical thinking, opening alternative reading paths. Across the anesthetic experiences of nineteenth-century American writers such as Margaret Fuller, Henry David Thoreau, and William James, two features recur—ineffability and plurality—that together define what I call “anesthetic reading.” Centering James, I show how he performs an anesthetic interpretation of Benjamin Paul Blood, an obscure American mystical philosopher, through a mosaic citational practice whose extensive footnotes stack parallel readings. Ultimately, these experiences suggest a method for non-intoxicated “anesthetic reading” in the present, where readers follow affective lines of insight while remaining sensitive to the ephemeral interpretations that develop out of slow, attentive reading.

Abstract:

This essay reads Emily Dickinson’s letter-poems as botanical forms: living, mobile, and governed by circulation. Drawing on Goethe’s “spiral tendency” and Darwin’s “circumnutation,” it argues that Dickinson’s correspondence develops through irregular, recursive motions analogous to vegetal movement. Considering Dickinson’s scientific training—herbarium, gardening, botanical education—alongside scholarship on the language of flowers and epistolary exchange, the essay demonstrates how letters function less as preserved specimens than as living media that grow through transfer and readerly uptake. Focusing on the trailing arbutus, it traces how Dickinson’s motifs of immortality and circumference register the intertwined vertical and spiral logics of plant life.

Abstract:

In this article, I argue that the aphoristic style of Emerson and Thoreau is inseparable from their scientific practice. Drawing on Francis Bacon’s vision of the aphorism as seed-like and perpetually generative, the Transcendentalists developed an open-ended aphoristic mode as a democratic alternative to the increasing professionalization of nineteenth-century science. Where the maxim distills wisdom into a portable gem, the scientific aphorism withholds closure, obliging readers to ruminate and test its suggestions against their own observation. I trace this aphoristic mode through Emerson’s early reading of Bacon’s Novum Organum and Thoreau’s ruminative inquiry across his Journal’s phosphorescent wood experiments. Recovering this aphoristic science reframes Transcendentalist prose as method rather than ornament, and anticipates present calls for a slower, pluralist science.

Abstract:

Increasingly, plants and especially linked forest trees are seen as capable of cognition and even literary “plant writing.” Simultaneously, scholars have identified Thoreau’s writing as a form of “radical empiricism,” highlighting his rejection of taxonomy. I bring these two streams together to suggest Thoreau’s “radicle empiricism,” gesturing to the plant’s taproot, or “radicle,” as a model for a more robust scientific practice that incorporates the empiricism of the plants themselves. Turning to vegetal entries in Thoreau’s Journal, I demonstrate how “radicle empiricism” attends to plants’ minor empirical perspective while also encouraging the reader to continue the root-like experimental process.

Abstract:

In this article, I examine Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson and Those Extraordinary Twins (1894) alongside nineteenth-century psychological theories, especially ideas about the double brain. While scholars have long acknowledged Twain’s fascination with twinship, I argue that the twinned and conjoined characters of this text reflect deeper concerns about mental duality and the divided self. I begin by demonstrating Twain’s longstanding interest in psychological and psychical research, including his own investigation into “mental telegraphy,” his membership in the Society for Psychical Research, and his acquaintance with famed psychologists including William James. Next, I show how the conjoined characters Angelo and Luigi demonstrate characteristics that commonly appear in theories of the dual-hemispheric structure of the brain. I then turn to the two tales themselves as evidence of a further conjoinment, where Twain performs hypnotic whispers and subconscious suggestion through his careful revision of the texts. Instead of a straightforward narrative, Twain creates a twinned story that disrupts linear storytelling, requiring readers to navigate layered and shifting interpretations. Ultimately, Twain’s entangled stories serve as a literary experiment that engages multiple forms of attention, paralleling contemporary conceptions of the double brain and challenging readers to experience the reading of fictional narrative as a more psychological, nuanced process.