Ashton Nichols
From Philosopedia
Ashton Nichols (7 June 1953 - )
Nichols holds the Walter E. Beach '56 Distinguished Chair in Sustainability Studies and Professor of English Language and Literature at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.
A graduate of the University of Virginia, where he was both a DuPont Scholar and a member of Phi Beta Kappa, he spent three years as an award-winning journalist before returning to the university for both his M.A. and Ph.D. in English. On the recommendation of Wittgenstein scholar Cora Diamond, he studied philosophy at University College London in 1973-74.
The recipient of teaching awards that include both the Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching and the Ganoe Award for Inspirational Teaching, he is the author of The Revolutionary “I”: Wordsworth and the Politics of Self-Presentation and The Poetics of Epiphany: Nineteenth-Century Origins of the Modern Literary Moment as well as a teaching anthology, Romantic Natural Histories: William Wordsworth, Charles Darwin, and Others.
His scholarly publications cover a wide range of topics that include Emerson and Thoreau, Chinua Achebe, Derek Walcott, Thomas Pynchon, Seamus Heaney, Salman Rushdie, Werewere Liking, J. M. Coetzee, African exploration narratives, Victorian poetry, and travel writing. Also, he has published numerous nature essays as well as his own poetry and fiction.
Nichols is an associate editor of The International Journal of the Humanities and has served as the new technologies editor for Nineteenth Century Studies. He is also the designer and developer of A Romantic Natural History: 1750–1859, a hypertext project that has been recognized for excellence by The New York Times, the BBC in London, M.I.T., Romantic Circles, and the BLTC “Site of the Day”.
The results of his recent research, “Thoreau and Urbanature: From Walden to Ecocriticism” (first delivered at a Fulbright-sponsored conference at Tsinghua University in Beijing), have appeared in Neohelicon, an international journal of comparative literature published in Hungary. He has also served as the only American contributor to the first Chinese textbook on “Ecological Literature,” published by The People's Press in Beijing under the auspices of Lanzhou Jiaotong University in Gansu Province. He has coined the terms "urbanature" and "roosting" to describe ways in which distinctions between the natural and the human, the nonhuman and the cultural, now need to be collapsed into a unitary concept. These developments are charted in his manuscript, Beyond Romantic Ecocriticsm: Toward Urbanatural Roosting, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2011. Ecocritic Scott Slovic, editor of ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies of Literature and Environment, says of the book:
- Ambitious, learned, experimental, and thoroughly readable, Beyond Romantic Ecocriticism posits 'urbanatural roosting' as a vital twenty-first-century mode of ecological thinking. Perhaps this is what the Chinese might call the 'tian ren he yi' (the harmonious unity of the universe and man) of the new millennium. An inspired (and inspiring) book!
Kate Rigby, the author of Topographies of the Sacred: The Poetics of Place in European Romanticism, has written of the work,
- Part lyrical memoir, part literary and cultural history, part philosophical meditation, Nichols’ compelling new book is above all an eloquent, erudite, and impassioned manifesto for a new way of thinking, writing, and living more self-consciously, equitably, and sustainably on this earth. Stressing both the historicity of ‘wilderness’ and the naturality of the city, Nichols envisages the collaboration of scientific knowledge, urban design and the artistic imagination in the crafting of thriving ‘ecomorphic’ townscapes as part of a wider practice of sharing and caring for all of earth’s diverse, yet all more or less humanized places and spaces.
Nichols is currently a Willoughby Fellow at Dickinson, integrating a wide range of digital tools into classrooms and research projects. He has participated in the development of pedagogical tools that employ a wide range of hyper-textual elements: online blogs, wiki-pages and web pages, social networking, and e-syllabus portals. He is a founding faculty member of Dickinson in the Galápagos, a program that takes students and faculty the Galápagos Islands and mainland Ecuador, and he has served as director of the Dickinson Humanities and Science Programs in London at the University of East Anglia (UEA), where he was a visiting lecturer in 1994-5. In recent years he has delivered keynote addresses and lectures in nations around the world, including China, England, France, Italy, Japan, India, Portugal, Cameroon, and Morocco.
(See homepage.)
Selected Works
- Poetics of Epiphany: 19th Century Origins of the Modern Literary Moment (1987)
- Romantic Natural Histories (2003)
- Emerson, Thoreau, and the Transcendentalist Movement (2006)
- Beyond Romantic Ecocriticsm: Toward Urbanatural Roosting, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011)
(See entry for Lionel Trilling.)
