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Lafayette’s Laura Dassow Walls, an associate professor of English, is the recipient of a $24,000 research fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Walls’ areas of special interest and expertise include the intersections of literature and natural science in the 19th century. Her current research project focuses on Alexander von Humboldt, a German naturalist and explorer whose book Cosmos, published in five volumes from 1845 to 1862, is one of the most ambitious scientific works ever written.
Walls describes Humboldt’s concept of the universe as a “distinctive marriage of physical nature to aesthetics, morality, and the intellect.” He became an icon of science in United States during his lifetime, but his integrative vision of the “cosmos” fell into disfavor after his death. Walls is exploring Humboldt’s concept, its fall, and the current resurgence of attention to natural scientists whose theories “rejoin” the sciences and the humanities.
The BBC featured Walls in a one-hour program “Alexander von Humboldt: Natural Traveller” that aired last summer in Europe in its series Wilderness Men. She is the author of Seeing New Worlds: Henry David Thoreau and Nineteenth-Century Natural Science, published in 1995 by the University of Wisconsin Press. She is currently finishing a book on science as cultural knowledge in the antebellum United States. The working title is The Culture of Truth: Poetry, Science, and Society in the Age of Emerson.
Walls is the editor of Material Faith: Thoreau on Science, published in 1999 by Houghton Mifflin, which includes an introduction written by Walls and a foreword by E.O. Wilson. She is co-editor of The Journal of Henry David Thoreau, Vol. 9, scheduled for publication in 2004 by Princeton University Press. Her work has appeared in American Quarterly, Configurations, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, The Concord Saunterer, and numerous edited volumes.
Her teaching interests include 19th-century American literature, especially the American Renaissance, with special attention paid to authors such as Melville, Hawthorne, Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Emily Dickinson; colonial and Revolutionary American literature; and the influences of science and literature on each other from Galileo to the present, including figures such as Stephen Hawking, E.O. Wilson, and Carl Sagan.
Walls joined the Lafayette faculty in 1992, after receiving a Ph.D. in American Literature, with a minor in Victorian Studies, from Indiana University. Her dissertation topic was “The Consilience of Emersonian Wholes and Humboldtian Science in Henry David Thoreau.” She holds master’s and bachelor’s degrees in English from the University of Washington.
Walls serves as faculty co-liaison of Lafayette’s VAST (Values and Science/Technology) program, interdisciplinary courses that incorporate approaches from the natural and social sciences, the humanities, and/or the arts.
In May, Walls and VAST co-liaison Thomas R. Yuster , associate professor of mathematics, received Lafayette’s James P. Crawford Award honoring a faculty member who has demonstrated a high standard of classroom instruction. The award honors James P. Crawford, who has taught in the department of mathematics since 1957. In 1998, Walls received Lafayette’s Thomas Roy and Lura Forrest Jones Faculty Lecture Award for superior teaching and scholarship. In 1995, she received the Schachterle Prize for the best article by an untenured professor from the Society for Literature and Science.
Other NEH fellowship recipients in Pennsylvania are faculty members from the University of Pennsylvania, Haverford College, Franklin & Marshall College, and Temple University and one independent scholar.
A National Leader in Undergraduate Research. Benjamin Saxton ’04 was invited to present his senior honors research under the guidance of Laura Dassow Walls, professor of English, at the 18th National Conference on Undergraduate Research.