Thoreau bicentennial and a new website

I am happy to report that last summer’s Thoreau Society Bicentennial Gathering was a huge success. The Thoreau Society and the Thoreau Farm kicked off the celebration on July 12, 2017, with a birthday cake. The highlight of the AG was the moving keynote by Terry Tempest Williams. It was great meeting Terry and reuniting with the community of Thoreau scholars and enthusiasts who support the mission of the Thoreau Society. Once again, the Ralph Waldo Emerson Society sponsored an evening panel where I had the opportunity to speak about Thoreau’s influence on Emerson’s later writings. I also contributed an essay to the special bicentennial issue of the Thoreau Society Bulletin on the subject Thoreau and truth, which coincided with last summer’s event.

Having helmed the Bulletin for over three years, I decided it was time to move on. My last issue as editor was TSB #300. I am happy to announce that Brent Ranalli has taken over editorial duties.

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The big 200th birthday celebration for Henry David Thoreau and my role as the editor of The Thoreau Society Bulletin took up a lot of my time during the past four years. Now that the Thoreau Bicentennial has officially ended, I thought I would finally get around to re-launching my personal website.

To misquote Robert Frost, Something there is that doesn’t like a personal website–in the same way one might loathe Linkedin self-promotion or roll one’s eyes at the convening of a TED talk. And yet, as Frost would remind us, our ambivalence toward such things does not prevent us from doing what it expected of us. So it is, begrudgingly, that I give you (who may need least reminding, mostly) this monument to my academic career–which is probably as monumental as a stone turned over.