Research

Jake McGinnis studies U.S. literature and environmental history of the long nineteenth century as a source of inspiration for new and emerging forms of environmentalism and social justice. Broadly interested in literary writing as a means of experimental thinking, his research draws from the fields of ecocriticism, environmental history, Indigenous studies, and affect theory to examine the literary forms that shape present understandings of the world around us. His book project, Disturbance Ecologies: Thoreau’s Excursions and Anthropocene Nonfiction argues that antebellum American travel writing reflects the ecological and social conditions today associated with modernity and the Anthropocene, especially environmental instability, anxiety over looming social and cultural change, and the ongoing presence of marginalized and disenfranchised voices.

McGinnis’s writing and research have recently appeared ESQ: A Journal of Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture, The Concord Saunterer, The Thoreau Society Bulletin, and in The Palgrave Handbook of Global Sustainability. From 2016 to 2020 he served as managing editor of ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, the journal of the Association for the Study of the Literature and Environment (ASLE).

Works in Progress

Book Project

Disturbance Ecologies: Thoreau’s Excursions and Anthropocene Nonfiction.

  • A history of nineteenth-century U.S. travel writing and the excursion as a literary form, tracing the techniques of historical writers forward to twenty-first-century Anthropocene nonfiction. Draws from theories of veer ecology to explore “disturbances” in texts, or moments when authors are forced to respond to a lively, dynamic world full of human and inhuman forces.

Articles in Progress

“George Copway’s Figures of Homesickness.”

“‘Many schemes of running away’: Petromodernity and Zitkala-Ša’s American Indian Stories.” 

“Margaret Fuller’s Walden: Toward an Ecology of Influence.”

““Storied Landscapes, Protected Spaces, and the Settler-Colonial Commons: The Environmental Legacy of Thoreau’s The Maine Woods.”