Rate My Professor Scott Hess

Scott Hess, Ph.D., serves as Professor of English and Sustainability at Earlham College, where he joined the faculty in 2001 and teaches in both the English and Environmental Sustainability departments. He holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University and a B.A. from Swarthmore College. Hess's primary expertise lies in the environmental humanities, which examines how culture, history, and imagination shape environmental and social issues, as well as 18th- and 19th-century British and American literature and culture. His research connects literary representations of nature with developments in authorship, nationalism, print culture, landscapes, discourses of genius, and the self, illuminating their significance for contemporary environmentalism.

Hess is the author of three scholarly monographs: Authoring the Self: Self-Representation, Authorship, and the Print Market in British Poetry from Pope through Wordsworth (Routledge, 2005), William Wordsworth and the Ecology of Authorship: The Roots of Environmentalism in Nineteenth-Century Culture (University of Virginia Press, 2012), and Landscapes of Genius and the Transatlantic Origins of Environmentalism: Nineteenth-Century British and American Literary Cultures of Nature (Cambridge University Press, 2025). He has published extensively in peer-reviewed journals, including “Cedar Hill: Frederick Douglass’s Literary Landscape and the Racial Construction of Nature” (American Literature, 2021), “Walden Pond as Thoreau’s Landscape of Genius” (Nineteenth-Century Literature, 2019), “The Romantic Work of Genius: Author, Nature, Nation, and the ‘Genial Criticism’ of Samuel Taylor Coleridge” (Modern Language Quarterly, 2019), “Thoreau’s Legacy for Climate Change” (The Concord Saunterer, 2020), and “Aotearoa New Zealand, Traditional Ecological Knowledge, and a Relational Method for the Environmental Humanities” (Studies in Romanticism, 2023). From 2022, he completed a three-year term on the Executive Council of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE), serving as conference chair. His courses include “Environmental Humanities and Social Justice,” “American Literature and Ecology,” “Imagining Climate Change,” “Race, Ethnicity, and Nature in American Literature,” “Posthumanism,” and core English offerings such as “Foundations of Literary Study.” Hess has given public talks on climate change imagination through the Indiana Humanities “Unearthed” Speaker Series and is working on book projects concerning relational methodologies for the environmental humanities and cultural representations of climate change.