Laura Dassow Walls, Ph.D.
As a Senior Scholar with the Center for Humans and Nature Laura was able to concentrate on completing the bulk of the first draft of Passage to Cosmos, which was partly inspired by the meetings led by Strachan Donnelly. The gatherings he drew together of engaged and committed scholars from the sciences, philosophy, economics, literature and religion echoed in many ways the approach to learning and activism modeled by Humboldt himself, who saw the Cosmos as an evolving narrative continually shaped by the interactions of humans and nature, giving humans both the freedom and the responsibility to enact a cosmopolitan respect for all peoples, and a commitment to education as the republic’s most important national trust.
Her book, Passage to Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America (Chicago 2009), turns to Humboldt to explore his concept of “Cosmos” and the meaning of this concept for American science, politics, national culture, environmentalism, and literature and the arts. The Organization of American Historians has given Passage to Cosmos the Merle Curti Award for best book in intellectual history, and the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts has given it the Michelle Kendrick Memorial Award for best book in literature, science, and the arts by an SLSA member. During 2010-11, Laura is on leave from teaching, thanks to a Guggenheim Fellowship, to work on her current book project, a new biography of Henry David Thoreau.
About Dr. Walls
Laura Dassow Walls currently holds the John H. Bennett Jr. Chair of Southern Letters at the University of South Carolina, where she teaches courses in American literature and in literature and science. She is a graduate of Indiana University (1992), and she taught at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania from 1992-2004, where she directed the Values and Science/Technology Program and first became involved with the Center for Humans and Nature. She has published widely on Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Alexander von Humboldt, and other scientists and literary figures in the nineteenth century, including Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Louis Agassiz, S. Weir Mitchell, and Louisa May Alcott. Laura grew up near Seattle, Washington, where she attended the University of Washington, earning a B.A. degree in creative writing and an M.A. degree in American literature. While there, she began working as a scientific illustrator and spent some years doing free-lance botanical and wildlife illustration and teaching classes in realistic drawing techniques before returning to graduate school to continue her long interest in literature and science.
Laura’s academic career centers on American Transcendentalism, especially Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson; she has edited or co-edited several collections of essays, including most recently The Oxford Handbook of Transcendentalism (2010). Her first book, Seeing New Worlds: Henry David Thoreau and Nineteenth-Century Natural Science (Wisconsin 1995), argued that Thoreau’s career as a literary author was deeply involved in the sciences, particularly the exploration science of Alexander von Humboldt and Charles Darwin. In her second book, Emerson’s Life in Science: The Culture of Truth (Cornell 2003), she contrasted the equally profound but quite different indebtedness to science of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who found in modern science, particularly physics and pre-Darwinian geology and evolutionary theory, a new, secular basis for spiritual belief and political action, a proposal that grew into American Transcendentalism and led beyond to American Pragmatism.
