#  Panelists and Discussants 

 



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##  Hosts 

 

  [### Charles M. Stang 

 ](/people/charles-stang)Director, Center for the Study of World Religions and Professor of Early Christian Thought



 

   ![charles stang](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/styles/hwp_16_9__480x270/public/2026-09/240815_ProfessorStang1.jpg.resize.jpg?h=200c6c8f&itok=gkpd7pc5) 

 

 

 

  [### Russell Powell

 ](/people/russell-powell)Research Associate, Transcendentalism



 

   ![Russell Powell](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/styles/hwp_16_9__480x270/public/2026-09/PowellR_headshot.jpg?h=9376aa34&itok=XGWTyr4I) 

 

 

 

  [### Gosia Sklodowska

 ](/people/gosia-sklodowska)Executive Director, Center for the Study of World Religions



 

   ![Gosia Sklodowska](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/styles/hwp_16_9__480x270/public/2026-09/06122023-gosiasklodowska-004_0.jpg?h=e59d4928&itok=J40uV6Vh) 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

##  Participating Scholars 

 

### Alda Balthrop-Lewis 

 

Alda Balthrop-Lewis is Associate Professor of Religion at Florida State University. She studies ethics—the norms, principles, relationships, and practices people use in their efforts to live well. In *Thoreau's Religion* (Cambridge University Press, 2021), she explores questions of environmental justice, demonstrating how Henry David Thoreau's religious practice in *Walden* enacts the intrinsic connection between his ecological commitments and his political commitments to abolition and labor justice.

Her current book project, *Contemplation and Complicity*, examines twentieth-century Thoreauvians, particularly the Trappist monk Thomas Merton, and the ways his reading of Thoreau shaped his engagement with the politics of race and environment in the 1960s.

Balthrop-Lewis also supports scholarly publishing as an Associate Editor of *Environmental Humanities* and as co-editor, with Jonathan Tran, of the American Academy of Religion–sponsored book series *Reflection and Theory in the Study of Religion*, published by Oxford University Press.



 



      ![Alda Balthrop-Lewis](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/styles/hwp_1_1__480x480/public/2025-07/Alda_headshot.jpeg?h=877195d7&itok=T5lIBrq8) 

 

 

  

 



 

 

 

### Jane Bennett 

 

Jane Bennett is a teacher, writer, and scholar in the environmental humanities, with a special interest in (nonhuman) nature and its influences upon and within us. Over the course of several books, including *Vibrant Matter*, *The Enchantment of Modern Life*, and *Thoreau's Nature*, Bennett explores an ecological materialism concerned with acknowledging the vitality of everyday objects and forces, in the hope of opening a path beyond the destructive materialism of endless consumption and waste.

Her most recent book, *Influx and Efflux: Writing Up with Walt Whitman*, turns to the question of how to re-envision human agency, understood as one set of efforts operative within a world teeming with powerful nonhuman influences. With the help of Whitman and others, it seeks a non-anthropocentric model of the self and elaborates a syntax and mode of speech appropriate to a pluralist, democratic, and ecological America.

In 2026, Bennett was awarded the Thoreau Society Medal in recognition of her contributions to the ideals and works of Thoreau. She is currently working on a study of parallels between American transcendentalist thought—particularly its practices of attention to the diffuse or atmospheric forces of nature's influence—and the classical Chinese text *Zhuangzi*, one of the sources of Daoism.



 



      ![Jane Bennett](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/styles/hwp_1_1__480x480/public/2025-07/thumbnail_Bennett%20headshot.jpg?itok=hPC3DtUk) 

 

 

  

 



 

 

 

### Lawrence Buell 

 

Lawrence Buell is Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature Emeritus at Harvard University. His previous books include *Literary Transcendentalism* (1973), *The Environmental Imagination* (1995), *Emerson* (2003), and *Henry David Thoreau: Thinking Disobediently* (2023). Among other prizes and awards, he has received the Christian Gauss Award for Emerson and the Modern Language Association’s Jay Hubbell Award for lifetime contributions to American Literature studies (2007). He has lectured worldwide on American Transcendentalism. He has received lifetime service awards from both the Emerson Society and the Thoreau Society. In 2007, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.



 



      ![Lawrence Buell](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/styles/hwp_1_1__480x480/public/2025-09/Lawrence%20Buell%202025%20headshot%20%281%29.jpg?itok=TQkU5A0R) 

 

 

  

 



 

 

 

### Ryan Carr 

 

Ryan Carr is a lecturer at Columbia, where he teaches classes in American studies, English, and the Core Curriculum. He is the author of *Samson Occom: Radical Hospitality in the Native Northeast* (Columbia, 2023) and co-editor of the forthcoming *Writings of Samson Occom* (Oxford World's Classics, 2027). He is currently exploring the political thought of Frederick Douglass and his relationships with Transcendentalists and Christian liberals such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Theodore Parker.



 



      ![Ryan Carr looking into the camera](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/styles/hwp_1_1__480x480/public/2026-08/carr_headshot.jpeg?itok=46VyviSe) 

 

 

  

 



 

 

 

### Kristen Case 

 

Kristen Case is a poet and scholar whose books include *American Pragmatism and Poetic Practice*, *Little Arias*, *Principles of Economics*, *Henry David Thoreau's Kalendar*, and *Daphne*. She has co-edited several essay collections on American writers and is currently co-editing *The Oxford Handbook of Henry David Thoreau* with James Finley.

Case serves as Executive Director of the Monson Seminar, a residential arts and humanities program for Pell-eligible college students, and is visiting faculty at the Lynch School of Education and Human Development at Boston College. She lives in Maine.



 



      ![Kristen Case looking into the camera](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/styles/hwp_1_1__480x480/public/2026-08/IMG_5710.jpeg?itok=3nuIVnye) 

 

 

  

 



 

 

 

### Peter Catapano 

 

Peter Catapano is an author and editor who has worked at *The New York Times* since 1998. He is the founding editor of the Times’ philosophy series *The Stone*, which ran for eleven years, and co-editor of four essay collections. His writing has appeared in *The New York Times*, *The Los Angeles Review of Books*, and *Frequencies: A Collaborative Genealogy of Spirituality*.

Catapano began his career delivering newspapers in his Staten Island neighborhood at age twelve. Before joining *The New York Times* as a news assistant, he worked as a waiter, bartender, newsroom clerk, middle school science teacher, tutor, and rock drummer. He graduated from Cornell University in 1985 and later studied fiction and poetry at Brooklyn College.

His interests include ambient and experimental music, poetry, improvisation, devotional practice, and the relationship between the natural world and artistic creation. He is currently writing several books—or perhaps one very long one—at a deliberately unhurried pace.



 



      ![Peter Catapano looking into the camera](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/styles/hwp_1_1__480x480/public/2026-06/Catapano%20%283%29.jpg?itok=N4VSkNlf) 

 

 

  

 



 

 

 

### Lydia Willsky-Ciollo 

 

Lydia Willsky-Ciollo is a historian of American religion whose research focuses on religious movements in the Early Republic and antebellum United States, with particular attention to Unitarians, Transcendentalists, and new religious movements. She is Professor of Religious Studies and Director of American Studies at Fairfield University.

Her research explores religious authority, theology and Henry David Thoreau, New England religious thought, and liberal Christian women's reform movements. In her capacity as a local scholar and participant in the Transcendentalism Initiative, she is exploring nineteenth-century Transcendentalist-Unitarian and social reformer Caroline Dall's children's book series, *Patty Gray's Journey to the Cotton Islands*, which is part of a larger project on the life and works of Dall.

Willsky-Ciollo received her PhD from Vanderbilt University in 2013, her Master of Theological Studies from Harvard Divinity School in 2007, and her bachelor's degree from Connecticut College in 2005. Before joining the faculty at Fairfield University, she was a Visiting Assistant Professor at Whittier College and an Adjunct Professor at Connecticut College.



 



      ![Lydia Willsky-Ciollo, arms crossed looking into the camera](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/styles/hwp_1_1__480x480/public/2026-07/L.Willsky-Ciollo.jpg?itok=ZwhxRgta) 

 

 

  

 



 

 

 

### Phyllis Cole 

 

Phyllis Cole is a past fellow of Harvard Divinity School's [Women's Studies in Religion Program](https://wsrp.hds.harvard.edu/) and currently a Professor Emerita of English, Women's Studies, and American Studies at Penn State Brandywine. She has been an officer or board member of the Emerson, Thoreau, and Fuller Societies and participated in their meetings through the years. Much of her work has concentrated on the letters and journals of the Transcendentalists, as both a genre and a source of insight into published works. She is the author of *Mary Moody Emerson and the Origins of Transcendentalism: A Family History* (Oxford University Press**,** 1998) and co-editor of the essay collection *Toward a Female Genealogy of Transcendentalism* (University of Georgia Press, 2014). Her current work is a study of health issues in Transcendentalist women's private writing.



 



      ![Phyllis Cole smiling into the camera](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/styles/hwp_1_1__480x480/public/2026-03/Phyllis%20Cole%20Image.jpg?itok=yrNcgi_A) 

 

 

  

 



 

 

 

### Simon Cox 

 

Simon Cox received his PhD in the Study of Religion from Rice University in 2019 and is the author of *The Subtle Body: A Genealogy* (Oxford University Press, 2022). He is a Research Fellow at the Esalen Center for Theory and Research and a Visiting Scholar at the Center for the Study of World Religions (CSWR) at Harvard Divinity School.

His research focuses on the intellectual history of subtle body traditions, with particular attention to the parallel genealogies of the Western concept of energy and the Chinese concept of *qi*. Bringing together the history of religions, philosophy, and intellectual history, his work explores how these traditions have shaped evolving conceptions of the body, consciousness, and cosmology across Eurasia.

At the CSWR, Cox is developing a dual genealogy of energy and *qi*, tracing their distinct historical trajectories from Neoplatonism and the Hermetic traditions in the West and from early Chinese philosophy and Daoism in East Asia. By examining both their independent development and their modern convergence, the project illuminates the conceptual foundations of contemporary discussions of religion, science, and embodiment.



 



      ![Simon Cox, arms crossed, smiling into the camera](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/styles/hwp_1_1__480x480/public/2026-07/Wonderstruck_0429.JPG?itok=3oa8grex) 

 

 

  

 



 

 

 

### Alice de Galzain 

 

Alice de Galzain is a postdoctoral researcher and former Marie Skłodowska-Curie Seal of Excellence Fellow at Sorbonne Université (2024–2026). She is a Visiting Scholar with the Transcendentalism Initiative at the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School for the 2026–27 academic year.

Her book project, tentatively titled *Cultivating Feminism: Brook Farm and the American Women’s Movement*, examines the feminist subculture that emerged within Transcendentalist utopian communities. She is Associate Editor of *The Concord Saunterer: A Journal of Thoreau Studies* and Associate Editor of *Margaret Fuller, Periodical and Other Writings* (2 vols.), forthcoming in the Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Writings of Margaret Fuller.

Her scholarship has appeared in *Transatlantica*, *LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory*, *The Dial*, *The Concord Saunterer*, and *Legacy*. Her essay on Nathaniel Hawthorne and Margaret Fuller appears in *Hawthorne Inside Out* (Nanterre UP, 2026), and her forthcoming essay, “Margaret Fuller on Gender and Greek Mythology,” will appear in *The History of Platonism in the Modern Age*, Vol. V (Cambridge UP).



 



      ![Alice de Galzain smiling into the camera](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/styles/hwp_1_1__480x480/public/2026-07/Aliced.Galzain.png?h=d679250c&itok=7WpSnDuk) 

 

 

  

 



 

 

 

### Cristin Ellis 

 

Cristin Ellis specializes in nineteenth-century American literature and culture and the history of environmental thought. Her first book, *Antebellum Posthuman: Race and Materiality in the Mid-Nineteenth Century* (Fordham University Press, 2018), examines the intersections of nineteenth-century racial and environmental sciences and their influence on abolitionist discourse in the works of Frederick Douglass, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman. Her current book project develops a theory and multidisciplinary archive of "ecoerotics"—the cultural idea that sensory encounters with the natural world are vital to human flourishing.

Ellis earned her PhD in English from Johns Hopkins University and is Associate Professor of English at the University of Mississippi. She serves on the board of the Thoreau Society and previously served as co-director of Environmental Studies at the University of Mississippi, vice president of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (ASLE), and a member of the editorial board of *J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists*.



 



      ![Cristin Ellis smiling into the camera](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/styles/hwp_1_1__480x480/public/2026-07/image%20%282%29.png?itok=tlsqQUio) 

 

 

  

 



 

 

 

### Rebecca Kneale Gould 

 

Rebecca Kneale Gould is Associate Professor of Environmental Studies at Middlebury College, where she co-directs the Religion, Philosophy, and Environment Focus. Trained in the study of religion, her research explores the intersections of religion, environmental thought, and contemporary spiritual practice in North America.

Gould is the author of *At Home in Nature: Modern Homesteading and Spiritual Practice in America* and co-editor, with Russell C. Powell, of a special issue of the *Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture* examining the legacies of influential environmental writers, including Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Muir, and Rachel Carson. Her recent scholarship has addressed topics including Thoreau and race, ecological traditions in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and the relationship between religion and environmental stewardship.

She also serves as Senior Research Associate for The BTS Center and has contributed to documentary projects on nature, spirituality, and the life and legacy of Henry David Thoreau.



 



      ![Rebecca Gould smiling sitting next to a sheep](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/styles/hwp_1_1__480x480/public/2026-06/Rebecca%20Gould_photo.jpg.crop_.jpg?itok=rKXoD82O) 

 

 

  

 



 

 

 

### Robert Gross 

 

Robert A. Gross is James L. and Shirley A. Draper Professor of Early American History Emeritus at the University of Connecticut. His first book, *The Minutemen and Their World* (1976), presents a community study of the coming of the American Revolution in Concord, Massachusetts, site of “the shot heard ‘round the world.” Recipient of the 1977 Bancroft Prize, *Minutemen* was reissued in a revised and expanded edition (2022) by Picador Books.

Professor Gross’s latest book is *The Transcendentalists and Their* World, published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. A cultural study of major American writers and a deep social biography of a place and an idea, the book traces the impact of capitalism, democracy, and social reform on nineteenth-century Concord, and it explores, in turn, the influence of these changes on the ideas of Emerson and Thoreau.



 



      ![Robert Gross, smiling in front of Walden Pond](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/styles/hwp_1_1__480x480/public/2026-08/Screenshot%202026-08-06%20131834.png?itok=4tyGqmos) 

 

 

  

 



 

 

 

### Richard Higgins 

 

Richard Higgins is a writer, book coach and the author or editor of five books, including, most recently, *Thoreau’s God*, from the University of Chicago Press, which explores Thoreau’s iconoclastic religious quest, and *Thoreau and the Language of Trees*, about Thoreau’s multifaceted love of trees. A *Boston Globe* staff writer for 20 years, Richard is a member of the Thoreau Society board. A graduate of Holy Cross College, Columbia Journalism School, and Harvard Divinity School (MTS), Richard has written for *The New York Times*, *Washington Post*, *Christian Century*, *American Scholar,* and other publications.



 



      ![Richard Higgins' Image](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/styles/hwp_1_1__480x480/public/2026-05/RH2.jpg?itok=0UgWRZqk) 

 

 

  

 



 

 

 

### Lewis Hyde 

 

Lewis Hyde is a poet, essayist, translator, cultural critic, and MacArthur Fellow whose work explores the public life of the imagination, artistic practice, and the cultural commons. He is the author of *The Gift* (Random House, 1983), a landmark work that illuminates and defends the noncommercial dimensions of artistic practice. His other books include *Trickster Makes This World*, *Common as Air*, *A Primer on Forgetting*, and the poetry collection *This Error Is the Sign of Love*.

Hyde has also published two volumes of translations of Nobel laureate Vicente Aleixandre's poetry and is the editor of *On the Poetry of Allen Ginsberg* and *The Essays of Henry D. Thoreau*. He served as director of undergraduate creative writing at Harvard University and later as the Richard L. Thomas Professor in Creative Writing at Kenyon College until his retirement in 2018.

He earned a bachelor's degree in sociology from the University of Minnesota and a master's degree in comparative literature from the University of Iowa.



 



      ![Lewis Hyde looking into the camera](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/styles/hwp_1_1__480x480/public/2026-07/Hyde%20Head%20Shot.jpg?itok=EFKpQUF5) 

 

 

  

 



 

 

 

### Jenifer Ishee 

 

Jenifer Ishee is curator and library administrator at the Walden Woods Project. She holds an MA in history from the University of Nebraska, an MLIS from Kent State University, and a PhD in American history from Mississippi State University. She has taught writing and history at three universities and has worked in special collections for more than seven years. Her work has appeared in *Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies*, *The Journal of Military History*, and *The Journal of Academic Librarianship*.



 



      ![Jenifer Ishee smiling into the camera.](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/styles/hwp_1_1__480x480/public/2026-09/ishee.headshot.jpg?itok=kMbDzBAF) 

 

 

  

 



 

 

 

### Rochelle Johnson 

 

Rochelle L. Johnson is the Bernie McCain Chair in the Humanities at the College of Idaho, where she teaches writing and environmental humanities. She also holds the 2026 Robert Frost Chair at the Bread Loaf School of English, where she teaches literature and creative writing.

A creative writer and scholar of American environmental thought, Johnson is the author of *Passions for Nature: Nineteenth-Century America's Aesthetics of Alienation* and co-editor of several volumes, including *Thoreau in an Age of Crisis*. Her creative and scholarly work has appeared widely in academic and literary journals and in collections such as *Thoreauvian Modernities* and *Thoreau Beyond Borders*.

Johnson's research has been supported by fellowships from the American Antiquarian Society, the Beinecke Library, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. A former president of both the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment and The Thoreau Society, she currently chairs the Award Committee for the Thoreau Prize in Nature Writing.



 



      ![Rochelle Johnson looking into the camera](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/styles/hwp_1_1__480x480/public/2026-06/Rochelle%20Johnson%20photo%20%281%29.jpg.crop_.jpg?itok=glljN6Mx) 

 

 

  

 



 

 

 

### John Kaag 

 

John Kaag is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. His research and teaching focus on American philosophy, existentialism, and the history of ideas. He is the author of *American Philosophy: A Love Story* (FSG, 2016), *Hiking with Nietzsche* (FSG, 2018), and *Sick Souls, Healthy Minds: How William James Can Save Your Life* (Princeton, 2020), and co-author of *Henry at Work: Thoreau on Making a Living* (Princeton, 2023). In addition to his academic scholarship, his writing has appeared in venues such as *The New York Times*, *The Wall Street Journal*, and *The Chronicle of Higher Education*.



 



      ![John Kaag](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/styles/hwp_1_1__480x480/public/2025-08/John_Kaag.jpg?h=00baaf30&itok=UZN3H--K) 

 

 

  

 



 

 

 

### John Kucich 

 

John J. Kucich is a professor of English at Bridgewater State University. He is the former editor of *The Concord Saunterer*, the journal of the Thoreau Society**,** **;** the author of *Ghostly Communion: Cross-Cultural Spiritualism in 19th**-**Century American Literature* (Dartmouth, 2004); and author of several recent essays on the intersections between Native and European American cultures in the 18th and 19th centuries. He edited the essay collection *Rediscovering the Maine Woods: Thoreau's Legacy in an Unsettled Land* (University of Massachusetts Press, 2019) and co-edited *Henry David Thoreau and the Nick of Time* (Mercer University Press, 2025). His latest book is *Unsettling Thoreau: Native Americans, Settler Colonialism and the Power of Place* (University of Massachusetts Press, 2024). He currently serves as the president of the Thoreau Society.



 



      ![John Kucih](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/styles/hwp_1_1__480x480/public/2025-07/kucich%20headshot.jpg?h=eacc2e87&itok=M3Wv6s_0) 

 

 

  

 



 

 

 

### Nicholas Low 

 

Nicholas E Low received his PhD in the Study of Religion from Harvard University in 2023. He is currently an affiliate at the CSWR, and a research fellow at the Esalen Institute’s Center for Theory and Research. His work seeks to illuminate the religious and theological imaginary animating the tradition known as “continental philosophy,” focused especially on the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche and its reception in the 20th and 21st centuries. His first book, *Nietzsche, Dionysus, and Deification of Life,* forthcoming from Bloomsbury in 2026, treats the motif of Dionysian deification in Nietzsche’s writing, questioning how contemporary definitions of the concepts of both philosophy and religion have obscured the reception of Nietzsche’s thought, and arguing that Nietzsche’s project is best understood as an exemplary pursuit of deification.

His current project traces the emergence of a distinctly modern vision of “Nature” in European romanticism and vitalism, through philosophical anthropology and into American Transcendentalism and post-Nietzschean philosophy. The project inquires both into the historical conditions under which a peculiar vision of humanity's place within nature arises and investigates contemporary cultural sites where it is being either openly or subtly inhabited. He has written recently on how Nietzschean philosophy interacts with environmentalism, theories of ontological entanglement, techno-futurist visions of the superhuman, and Transcendentalism.



 



      ![Nicholas Low headshot](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/styles/hwp_1_1__480x480/public/hds_cswr/files/nicholaslow_400x400.jpg?itok=GOW3L-wR) 

 

 

  

 



 

 

 

### James Marcus 

 

James Marcus is the author of *Glad to the Brink of Fear: A Portrait of Ralph Waldo Emerson* (2024). His other books include *Amazonia: Five Years at the Epicenter of the Dot-Com Juggernaut* (2004), as well as seven translations from the Italian, most recently Giacomo Casanova's *The Duel* (2010). He also edited and introduced *Second Read: Writers Look Back at Classic Works of Reportage* (2012). His essays and reviews have appeared in *The New Yorker*, *The Times Literary Supplement*, *The Threepenny Review*, *The New Statesman*, *The Atlantic*, and other publications. He was awarded a 2026 Guggenheim Fellowship for his current project, a multigenerational narrative of family life. A former editor of *Harper's Magazine*, he lives in New York City and teaches at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute.



 



      ![James Marcus looking into the camera](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/styles/hwp_1_1__480x480/public/2026-07/James%20Marcus%20headshot%202.jpeg?itok=rk0KeT9L) 

 

 

  

 



 

 

 

### Megan Marshall 

 

Megan Marshall is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning *Margaret Fuller: A New American Life* (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013), *Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast* (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013), and *The Peabody Sisters* (Mariner, 2006), a Pulitzer Prize finalist. She is the Charles Wesley Emerson College Professor Emerita of nonfiction writing at Emerson College, a past president of the Society of American Historians, and a recipient of the BIO Award, the highest honor given by the Biographers International Organization. Her most recent book is *After Lives: On Biography and the Mysteries of the Human Heart* (Mariner, 2025).



 



      ![Megan Marshall looking into the camera](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/styles/hwp_1_1__480x480/public/2026-03/MM%20author%20photo%20head%20shot%20Sarah%20Putnam.jpg?itok=_I-rnAUb) 

 

 

  

 



 

 

 

### Rebecca Migdal 

 

  
Rebecca Migdal is the Executive Director of the Thoreau Alliance, formed through the merger of the Thoreau Society and the Thoreau Farm Trust. The Alliance champions Thoreau’s legacy in Concord and around the world, stewarding his birthplace and supporting a global community dedicated to Thoreau studies. With a background in museums and nonprofits and an MA from the Winterthur Program in American Material Culture, Rebecca brings expertise in public history and storytelling to her work. She is also the author of *Museum Mercenary: A Handbook for Independent Museum Professionals*.



 



      ![Rebecca Migdal looking into the camera.](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/styles/hwp_1_1__480x480/public/2026-09/Migdal-headshot.JPG?itok=OeXcBXX-) 

 

 

  

 



 

 

 

### Lydia Moland 

 

Lydia Moland is the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of Philosophy at Colby College. She is the author of *Lydia Maria Child: A Radical American Life* (2022), a biography of abolitionist Lydia Maria Child. Her writing has appeared in *The Wall Street Journal*, *The Washington Post*, *The Boston Globe*, and *American Scholar*, among other publications. She is also the author of books on classical German philosophy and co-editor of *The Oxford Handbook of American and British Women Philosophers in the Nineteenth Century* (2025). She has received grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the American Academy in Berlin. In 2025, she was a Fulbright Fellow at Freie Universität Berlin. She is currently working on a group biography of interwar pacifists, provisionally titled *Pacifist Women at War: Four Paths to Peace*.



 



      ![Lydia Moland looking into the camera](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/styles/hwp_1_1__480x480/public/2026-06/Lydia%20Moland.png?itok=VQqMfWyK) 

 

 

  

 



 

 

 

### Humphrey Morris 

 

Humphrey Morris is a psychoanalyst concerned with the relations of psychoanalysis, literature, and philosophy. He chairs the Psychoanalytic Practices Reading Group at the Mahindra Humanities Center. He majored in History and Literature at Harvard and at Yale School of Medicine wrote a thesis on Freud, “Metaphor and Metapsychology: Turnings of Figuration in Freud’s Theoretical Texts.”

With Joseph Smith, he edited *Telling Facts: History and Narration in Psychoanalysis* (Johns Hopkins, 1992). His recent publications include “The Analyst’s Offer” and “America’s Lacan *Après Coup*” in the *Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association* (2016 and 2023).

As he pursues his current project on the dynamics of mourning in Thoreau’s *Cape Cod* he looks forward to opportunities for interdisciplinary enrichment at the CSWR.



 



      ![Humphrey Morris looking into the camera ](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/styles/hwp_1_1__480x480/public/2026-08/4-up%20on%207-8-26%20at%205.09%20PM%20%28compiled%29.jpeg?itok=9lOALvK7) 

 

 

  

 



 

 

 

### Henrik Otterberg 

 

Henrik Otterberg is an economist at Chalmers Science Park in Gothenburg, Sweden, where he leads Kagaku Analys AB. His research focuses on zoöontology, aesthetics, and literary reception. He earned his PhD from the University of Gothenburg in 2014 with the dissertation “Alma Natura, Ars Severa: Expanses and Limits of Craft in Henry David Thoreau.” Since 2017, he has served as bibliographer and review editor for the *Thoreau Society Bulletin*. He has organized international conferences on Thoreau in Sweden and Iceland and co-edited *Thoreau in an Age of Crisis* (Brill, 2021) and *Thoreau and the Nick of Time* (Mercer University Press, 2025). His current research includes animal literary history, the Thoreau family pencil cores, and Thoreau’s writings on nocturnal experience.



 



      ![Henrik Otterberg looking into the camera](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/styles/hwp_1_1__480x480/public/2026-08/HENRIK%20OTTERBERG%20May%202026.jpg?h=afc60946&itok=hSiCtsy0) 

 

 

  

 



 

 

 

### Scott Pratt 

 

Scott L. Pratt is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oregon. His research and teaching focus on American philosophy, including pragmatism, feminist philosophy, philosophies of race, and Indigenous philosophy, as well as philosophy of education and the history of logic.

Pratt is the author of *Native Pragmatism: Rethinking the Roots of American Philosophy and Logic: Inquiry, Argument and Order*, and coauthor of *American Philosophies from Wounded Knee to the Present*. He has also co-edited several volumes and published widely on pragmatism, pluralism, logic, and Indigenous North American philosophy.

His current projects include *Absolute Pragmatism*; a co-authored history of natural logic; and *Against Critical Reason: Logic, Colonization, and Indigenous Philosophy*, which examines the role of logic in the colonization of North America and its implications for contemporary anti-colonial and decolonial thought.



 



      ![Scott Pratt looking intently into the camera](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/styles/hwp_1_1__480x480/public/2026-06/Pratt_Photo%28Large%29%5B74%5D.jpg?itok=pfCTEgW-) 

 

 

  

 



 

 

 

### Larry Rosenwald 

 

Lawrence Rosenwald is the Anne Pierce Rogers Professor of English Emeritus at Wellesley College, where he taught from 1980 to 2022. He has written extensively on diaries, words and music, translation, literary multilingualism, and the relationship between pacifism and literature. His *Emerson and the Art of the Diary* was published by Oxford University Press in 1988, and his Library of America edition of Emerson’s journals appeared in 2010. His current major project is a study of pacifism and literature. Rosenwald has also published translations of prose and poetry from Latin, German, French, and Yiddish and has written and performed more than 60 verse scripts for early opera and music theater.



 



      ![Larry Rosenwald looking into the camera](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/styles/hwp_1_1__480x480/public/2026-09/Photo%20on%201-10-25%20at%203.52%E2%80%AFPM%20%232.jpg?itok=ZbawVhHo) 

 

 

  

 



 

 

 

### Sarah Schorr 

 

Sarah Schorr is an artist-in-residence at the Center for the Study of Religion at Harvard Divinity School. A captivation with light, water, and modes of embodied contemplation runs through her work. Her new book, *Ephemeral Field Journal: Climate + Love in Claude Monet’s Garden* (published by Kehrer Verlag, 2025) follows her experiments with photography and water during her residency at Claude Monet’s Garden in Giverny. Sarah has received fellowships from the Terra Foundation for American Art, The Versailles Foundation, and the Danish Art Foundation for her work which is exhibited internationally. Since earning her PhD in media studies (2017), Sarah's research has focused on the continual evolution and transformation of photographic methods and theory in relation to emerging media. She is currently collaborating with CSWR Director Charles Stang on *Skywater*, a philosophy of water in words and text inspired by swimming in Walden Pond and the reflections of Henry David Thoreau.



 



      ![Sarah Schorr](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/styles/hwp_1_1__480x480/public/2025-01/Sarah%20Schorr.jpg?itok=U4K1v46I) 

 

 

  

 



 

 

 

### Susan Shumaker 

 

Susan Shumaker is a producer and story developer with Florentine Films and Ewers Brothers Productions, under the leadership of director Ken Burns. She recently served as story producer on the documentary film *Henry David Thoreau*, which aired on PBS in March 2026. With support from the Center for the Study of World Religions' (CSWR) Transcendentalism Initiative, she is currently developing a media project exploring the spiritual roots of the modern environmental and social justice movements.

Susan joined Florentine in 2002 and has been an integral member of the Emmy Award-winning teams behind *The War*, *The National Parks*, *The Dust Bowl*, *Country Music*, and, most recently, *The American Buffalo*.

Before joining Florentine, Susan worked at Harvard University with Diana Eck as the first coordinator of the Pluralism Project and later as a curator at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. Her introduction to filmmaking came through her work producing digital multimedia, including the award-winning educational CD-ROM *On Common Ground: World Religions in America*. She lives on a farm in West Virginia with her family, three quirky cats, and a very loving golden retriever.



 



      ![Susan Shumaker](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/styles/hwp_1_1__480x480/public/2025-08/Susan%20spring%20portrait%20headshot.jpg?itok=twAPUMFh) 

 

 

  

 



 

 

 

### Mona Simpson 

 

Mona Simpson is the author of the novels *Anywhere But Here*, *The Lost Father*, *A Regular Guy*, *Off Keck Road*, *My Hollywood*, *Casebook*, and *Commitment*. Born in Green Bay, Wisconsin, she moved to Los Angeles as a teenager. She studied poetry with Seamus Heaney at the University of California, Berkeley, worked as a journalist, and earned an MFA from Columbia University. While in graduate school, she published her first short stories in *Ploughshares*, *The Iowa Review*, and *Mademoiselle*. She later served as an editor at *The Paris Review* while completing *Anywhere But Here*. Her newest book, *The Wrong Girl*, will be published by Knopf in the summer of 2027.

Simpson has received numerous honors, including a Whiting Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship,a National Endowment for the Arts grant, a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, the Lila Wallace–Reader's Digest Prize, the *Chicago Tribune* Heartland Prize, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Mary McCarthy Prize. She lives in Santa Monica, California, with her husband and her dog, Copperfield.



 



      ![Mona Simpson smiling into the camera](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/styles/hwp_1_1__480x480/public/2026-07/mona_bio_v02.jpg.crop_.jpg?itok=pkHSsBU6) 

 

 

  

 



 

 

 

### Robert Thorson 

 

Robert Thorson is a Midwestern native, turned Northwestern geologist, turned Northeastern academic. After four years working as a field geologist for the U.S. Geological Survey in Alaska, California, and Seattle, he entered academia in 1979. He is now a Professor of Earth Sciences at the University of Connecticut juggling graduate and undergraduate teaching, scientific research, humanities scholarship, journalism, committee work, honors advising, and public engagement. His main interest is the meaning of nature, the interweave of landscape geology, historical archaeology, environmental history, American literature, and forest ecology. He credits transcendentalism in general, and Thoreau in particular, for helping him navigate the turbulent late 1960s and early 1970s and for re-booting his life after an unforgettable near-death experience. He is a family man who eagerly commutes to work on a woodland path and across a former pasture. His most recent of five Thoreau-themed books is forthcoming at Princeton University Press.



 



      ![Robert Thorson](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/styles/hwp_1_1__480x480/public/2025-08/Thor.png?itok=EJlJwZXt) 

 

 

  

 



 

 

 

### Christopher Volpe 

 

Christopher Volpe is an artist, writer, and educator based in New Hampshire. His paintings explore themes of mortality, mysticism, and the environmental consequences of contemporary consumer culture. He is represented by Georges Bergès Gallery in New York City.

Volpe's work is held in the permanent collections of the New Bedford Whaling Museum, the Whistler House Museum of Art, Smith College, Ege University in Turkey, and the University of New Hampshire. His honors and awards include serving as the inaugural artist-in-residence at Harvard Divinity School, as well as support from the Saint Botolph Club Foundation, MASS MoCA's Assets for Artists program, and the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts.

Trained in poetry, English, and philosophy at the University of New Hampshire and Stony Brook University, Volpe has taught painting, writing, literature, mythology, and art history. He also writes regularly about art and artists.



 



      ![Christopher Volpe](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/styles/hwp_1_1__480x480/public/2026-06/Chris%20Volpe_photo.jpg?itok=CI0fpuRu) 

 

 

  

 



 

 

 

### Ulrike Wagner 

 

Ulrike Wagner received her PhD in German and comparative literature from Columbia University and is director of German Studies at Bard College Berlin. Her research focuses on European Romanticism and American Transcendentalism.

She recently completed *Transcendental Philology: Emerson, Fuller, Nietzsche, and the Migrations of a Method*, a monograph that traces how philological practice in transatlantic contexts and beyond the university redefined the humanities as a force for educational freedom and democratic participation. The book shows how Emerson, Fuller, Herder, Schleiermacher, de Staël, Nietzsche, and their interlocutors turned writing, translating, reading, and discussion into living methods for asking what humanistic scholarship is for, how it shapes individual lives, and how it transforms ordinary experience across gendered and institutional boundaries.

During her residency, she will pursue a related project on women writers—including Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Bettine von Arnim, Rahel Varnhagen, and their circles—tracing how their philological and philosophical work created public forms of intellectual authority outside the academy and why those strategies continue to matter for contemporary debates about education and public access.



 



      ![Ulrike Wagner, arms crossed standing outside in front of trees, smiling into the camera](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/styles/hwp_1_1__480x480/public/2026-08/IMG_6290_UW.jpg?itok=CeSRj-zA) 

 

 

  

 



 

 

 

### Laura Dassow Walls 

 

Laura Dassow Walls is Professor Emerita at the University of Notre Dame, where she taught nineteenth-century American literature, particularly the American Transcendentalists, and the history and theory of ecological thought. Previously she taught at Lafayette College and the University of South Carolina. She has authored numerous essays on Thoreau, Emerson, Alexander von Humboldt, and related figures; her book *Henry David Thoreau: A Life* (Chicago**,** 2017) received Phi Beta Kappa's Christian Gauss Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Biography. Her other books include the award-winning *Passage to Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America* (2009); *Emerson's Life in Science: The Culture of Truth* (2003); and *Seeing New Worlds: Henry David Thoreau and Nineteenth-Century Natural Science* (1995). She now lives near Seattle, Washington, where she is working on a literary biography of the contemporary American writer Barry Lopez.



 



      ![Laura Walls smiling into the camera](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/styles/hwp_1_1__480x480/public/2026-07/Laura%20Dassow%20Walls%203%20%28Original%29.jpg?itok=JbZgytJ0) 

 

 

  

 



 

 

 

### Dan Wells 

 

Dan Wells (he/they) is a humanist, scientist, artist, writer, and educator whose work explores the interdependence and interconnectedness of all living beings. Trained in forest ecology and shaped by studies at Harvard Divinity School, Wells brings together perspectives from ecology, religion, and the environmental humanities to examine the spiritual and transcendental dimensions of the natural world.

Wells's research is informed by a wide range of traditions, including Buddhism, Catholic social thought, ecology, Indigenous North American belief systems, Quakerism, Unitarian Universalism, and Transcendentalism. His work investigates how these traditions illuminate relationships among humans, forests, and the broader community of life.

Based in the Coast Redwood forests of Northern California, Wells studies one of the world's most biologically complex ecosystems. Through scholarship, writing, and photography, he explores what the redwoods can teach about interconnectedness, ecological consciousness, and humanity's place within the living world. As a Visiting Scholar with the Transcendentalism Initiative, he looks forward to sharing these perspectives while learning from colleagues working across a wide range of disciplines.



 



      ![Dan Wells smiling in front of a tree](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/styles/hwp_1_1__480x480/public/2026-08/DWells.Image_.jpg?itok=lQ71BFas) 

 

 

  

 



 

 

 

### Peter Wirzbicki 

 

Peter Wirzbicki is Associate Professor of American History at Princeton University. His first book, *Fighting for the Higher Law: Black and White Transcendentalists against Slavery*, examines the intellectual and personal relationships between radical abolitionism and New England Transcendentalism.

His current research explores the intellectual history of Reconstruction, with a focus on how Americans understood democracy, rights, sovereignty, and suffrage in the years following the Civil War.



 



      ![Peter Wirzbicki smiling into the camera](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/styles/hwp_1_1__480x480/public/2026-06/Peter%20Wirzbicki%20photo.png.crop_.png?itok=O0cwn1g9)