Professional Appointments

Professor of English, Affiliate of the Institute for the Environment and Sustainability, and Affiliate of American Studies, Miami University of Ohio, 2014 to present

Assistant Professor of English, Texas Tech University, 2009-2014

Education

Ph.D., English, University of California, Irvine, 2009

M.A., English, University of California, Irvine, 2004

B.A., English, summa cum laude, Boston University, 2001

Books

Coral Lives: Literature, Labor, and the Making of America (Princeton University Press, 2023).

Liquid Landscape: Geography and Settlement at the Edge of Early America (University of Pennsylvania Press 2018).*

*Winner of the 2019 Rembert Patrick Award and the 2019 Stetson Kennedy Award from the Florida Historical Society.

Peer-reviewed essays

“Emerson Undersea.” Co-authored with Dominic Mastroianni. The Oxford Handbook of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Forthcoming, Spring 2024.

"Antebellum Coral." American Literature 91.2 (2019): 263-293.

"Island Nation: Mapping Florida, Revising America." Early American Studies 11.2 (2013): 243-271.

"Liquid Landscape: Possession and Floridian Geography." Early American Literature 47.1 (2012): 89-114.

other essays

Climate change is destroying reefs, but the effects are more than ecological.“ The Conversation. September 5th, 2023.

“Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Florida.” In Once Upon a Time in Florida: Stories of Life in the Land of Promises. Edited by Jacki Levine. University of Florida Press (forthcoming, November 2023). Originally published as “Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Florida” in FORUM: The Magazine of the Florida Humanities Council (Fall 2019): 42-45.

Review of Magnificent Decay: Melville & Ecology, by Tom Nurmi. Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies 24.1 (2022): 93-96.

Gulf of Knowledge: The Hidden Scientific History of the Early American Southeast.” Book review essay, Cameron B. Strang’s Frontiers of Science: Imperialism and Natural Knowledge in the Gulf South Borderlands, 1500-1850 (UNC Press, 2018). Southern Spaces (May 2019).

Coral, Labor, Slavery, and Silence in the Archives.” Age of Revolutions, “Revolutionary Material Cultures” Essay Series (April 22, 2019).

"A Book Full of Seaweed." Huntington Frontiers Magazine. (Spring/Summer 2018): 8-12.

RECENT Fellowships, Honors, and Awards

Fulbright Danish Distinguished Scholar Award in American Studies (2024-2025)

Yale Beinecke Library Short-Term Research Fellowship (Summer 2024)

Altman Fellowship, Miami University Humanities Center, “Environmental Justice” (2023-2024)

Associated Student Government's “Top Ten” Miami Faculty Award (2021-2022)

Rachel Carson Center Fellowship (Fall 2021)

National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship (2017-2018)

Exhibitions

“Marine Connections to Ohio—Coral: Animal, Vegetable, Mineral?” Exhibition of the work of visual artist Jill Krutick and author Michele Navakas. Organized by Steve Sullivan, Director, Hefner Museum of Natural History, Miami University. November 2023 through November 2024.

selected interviews

Reader Spotlight: Michele Navakas on the Cultural History of Coral,” Library Company Blog (2019).

America’s Erstwhile Coral Obsession,” Shelf Life, a Newberry Library Podcast (2018).

Interview on Liquid Landscape, Ideasphere with Guy Rathbun, KCBX (NPR), San Luis Obispo (2017).

A Brief History of Florida’s Landscape,” Gulf Coast Live with Julie Glenn, WGCU (NPR), Fort Myer

Recent & UPCOMING TALKS & Conference Participation

“Art, Climate Crisis, the Nineteenth Century, and the Public Humanities: Curating ‘Storm Cloud’ at The Huntington” (Organizer, Chair, and Respondent). The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists. Pasadena, March 2024.

Once Upon a Time in Florida: Stories of Life in a Land of Promises, Florida Humanities Council Authors’ Panel, Broward County Public Library, Coconut Creek, Florida, February 2024.

“Rachel Carson’s Melville.” Melville Society Panel, MLA, January 2024.

Object Talk at MFA Boston: “Coral, Women, Labor: Joseph Blackburn’s Isaac Winslow and His Family (1755).” Historians of Eighteenth-Century Art and Architecture (HECAA): “Environments, Materials, and Futures in the Eighteenth Century,” Boston, October 2023.

“Rachel Carson’s Nineteenth Century.” Association for the Study of Literature & Environment, Portland, July 2023

Full CV available upon request.