Projects

My current book project, “Instituting Wonder: Nature and National Belonging in U.S. Cultural History” examines how discourses of “wonder” have narrated U.S.-American relationships to land and become institutionalized in national, local, and commercial parks. By “wonder,” I mean an arresting emotional response of awe, which I consider to be bound up in rhetorical practices. For example, I trace the ways in which discourses of wonder were central to the writings of late nineteenth-century conservation pioneers such as John Muir, James Audubon, Theodore Roosevelt, and Gifford Pinchot. I argue that discourses of wonder subsequently became “nationalized” through Northern Pacific Railway’s “Wonderland” advertising campaign, launched in the 1880s to promote service to Yellowstone National Park. The campaign capitalized on the success of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and used magical, dreamlike images of Alice to advertise the “new wonderland” of Yellowstone and to promote wonder as the framework for understanding American landscapes. The project shows that this nationalization of wonder and conservation in the context of tourism has continued to shape the language we use to advocate for environmental conservation and justice through the wilderness movements of the 1960s, and in the development of environmental history as a discipline. The two other major case studies in the book examine zoos and Disney’s theme parks in showing that wonder experiences and rhetoric have shaped a particularly American experience of the environment that has both fueled activist movements for justice and produced widespread consumerist complacency.