I teach courses in environmental literary studies, public humanities, and European literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with emphases in media studies, information theory, and environmental history.  I also work with graduate students in community-facing projects in public arts and humanities.  I was Senior Personnel for the Blue-Green Action Platform, an NSF-funded program to share information and stories about nitrogen pollution with communities across different watersheds. I offer graduate courses in partnership with the Iowa Initiative for Sustainable Communities. 

My last book, Ossianic Unconformities: Bardic Poetry in the Industrial Age (Virginia UP, 2015), explores a modern quest to locate vestiges of ancient poetry in the landscapes of an industrial world.  My more recent publications continue to study the intersections of environmental and literary history in Scottish and French romanticism.  I have also published co-authored articles that apply methods from geographical information science, computational linguistics, and network modelling to the print archive of Scottish industrialization.  

Recent Press:

"Iowa Engineers Work with Artists, Writers, and Scholars to Humanize Water Quality Issues" (Dec, 2023)

"Looking Back in Bondurant to Look Forward: Humanities Lab Partners with Historical Society" (Dec. 2023)  

Recent Publications:

• With Munachim Amah, Javier Espinosa, Richard Frailing, Ellen Oliver, Clara Reynen, and Kaden St Onge, “Fluid Impressions: Connecting Data and Storytelling in Iowa’s Watersheds.” Open Rivers: Rethinking Water, Place & Community, no. 27 (2024).
• "Watershed Communities: River Systems in Coleridge and Geddes" Studies in Romanticism 62.1 (2023). Awarded Best Essay Prize for Volume 62. 
• With Michael Gavin, "The Conceptual Structure of Ossianic Space" Literary Geographies 9.1 (2023): 1-24.
• "Industrial Transport and Political Economy in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine" Studies in Romanticism 61.2 (Summer 2022): 279-303.
• "Scottish Poetry and Ecology" in The International Companion to Scottish Literature of the Long Eighteenth-Century, ed. Leith Davis and Janet Sorensen (Edinburgh University Press, 2021).
• "Romanticism and the Logic of Culture" Romantic Circles, 2020.
• With Michael Gavin, "Infrastructural Semantics: Postal Networks and Statistical Accounts in Scotland, 1790-1845" International Journal of Geographical Information Science (2019)  10.1080/13658816.2019.1631454.      

Research Interests:
Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century British Literature, Media, and Culture 
Environmental Humanities 
Public Humanities

Eric Gidal CV