I am an Associate Professor of English (American Literature) in the English department at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, VA, where I have taught since 1972. My BA and MA in English were taken at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, N.C.; my PhD in English, with a dissertation on the style of Thoreau's Walden, is from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.Academic areas of research interest include nineteenth century literature, nature writing, American women writers, reader-oriented literary theory, and the use of computers, especially hypertext, for teaching. I have published articles on Thoreau, Emerson, and teaching (some are on-line). Most recently I published an article on "Teaching Walden as Transcendental Strip Tease" in Approaches to Teaching Walden (MLA Press).
Like any good transcendentalist, I have a wide range of research and writing interests which are not particularly scholarly. My book, In River Time: The Way of the James (on the James River), was published in 1985 by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. My father aroused my interest in family history, and I have been collecting and researching family materials for five years; eighteenth century Virginia history, especially of the Huguenots who settled in Monacan, particularly intrigues me. Now that I live on a marsh creek in rural Virginia, birds and wildflowers have become other areas of passionate observation and study.
