This page is no longer being updated and remains online for informational and historical purposes only. The information is accurate as of the last page update.
For questions about page contents, contact the Communications Division.
Laura Dassow Walls, associate professor of English at Lafayette, is author of a new book entitled Emerson’s Life in Science: The Culture of Truth, published by Cornell University Press.
Walls’ areas of interest and expertise include the intersections of literature and natural science in the 1800s. In her view, Ralph Waldo Emerson exemplified the strong connection between transcendentalism and science in the 19th century.
Though Emerson is traditionally seen as a dreamer and mystic – concerned with the ideals of transcendentalism, not the realities of science and technology – science was central to his life and work, Walls says. The New England lecturer, poet, and essayist helped establish science as the popular norm of truth in America and helped modernize American popular thought, she maintains.
Walls makes the case that no study of literary history can be complete without embracing science as part of literature, and, conversely, that no history of science is complete unless we consider the role played by writers of literature who helped to install science in the popular imagination.
A member of Lafayette’s faculty since 1992, Walls is also author of Seeing New Worlds: Henry David Thoreau and Nineteenth-Century Natural Science, published in 1995 by the University of Wisconsin Press, and editor of Material Faith: Thoreau on Science, published in 1999 by Houghton Mifflin, which includes an introduction written by Walls.
“Emerson’s Life in Science immediately establishes Walls in the vanguard of Emerson studies,” says Joel Porte, Ernest I. White Professor of American Studies and Humane Letters at Cornell University. “As Laura Dassow Walls states at the outset, the notion that science, broadly understood, lies at the heart of Emerson’s work is ‘counterintuitive,’ but she makes her case and then some. She has produced a full intellectual biography of Emerson. In its breadth of scholarship, boldness of argument, comprehensiveness, and intellectual force it is without peer.”
David Robinson, Distinguished Professor of American Literature and director of American Studies at Oregon State University, says, “Laura Dassow Walls has a brilliant command of Emerson’s scientific sources and a very perceptive recognition of the centrality of science to his thought. Walls’s book should place scientific issues front and center in Emerson studies.”
Walls will host a keynote session entitled “Seeking Common Ground: A Dialogue on Integrating the Sciences and Humanities” with the Pulitzer prize-winning biologist E.O. Wilson of Harvard University June 6 at the fifth biennial conference of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment in Cambridge, Mass.
Emerson’s Life in Science was supported through a research fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies. Walls is also co-editor of The Journal of Henry David Thoreau, Vol. 9, which will be published by Princeton University Press.
The BBC featured Walls in a one-hour program “Alexander von Humboldt: Natural Traveler” that aired in its series Wilderness Men. In 2000 she received a $24,000 research fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities for research on 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.
Last spring Walls was adviser to Matthew Haggerty ’02 on an independent study of the life of 19th century writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman and her doctor, S. Weir Mitchell, whose prescription of a rest cure for Gilman nearly drove her insane.
Walls has a “contagious love of American culture and history,” says Haggerty, an English major and varsity swimmer from Delran, N.J.
Walls also mentored Shivani Mahendroo ’00, an English major from Ridgewood, N.J., in a study of the influence of Hinduism in 19th-century American literature. Mahendroo made a presentation on her research at the National Conference on Undergraduate Research.
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, engineering, the humanities, and/or the arts. She is also faculty liaison of the First-Year Seminar Program.
In 2000, 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.
Walls’ teaching areas include 19th-century American literature, especially the American Renaissance, with special attention 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’ work has also appeared in American Quarterly, Configurations, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, The Concord Saunterer, and numerous edited volumes.
She holds 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.