On this gorgeous weekend I’m taking in the festivities of Short Beach Days and peering over the knife’s edge of the new semester. Actually I lost my balance and plunged in already — even taught a class this past Friday morning — but I still think the semester can’t begin in full force until after Labor Day.
It’s going to be a busy year, for me and for the St. John’s English Department. On the SJU front, we’ve officially opened our PhD program in English, which will replace our DA program. We’ll be celebrating and publicizing this with a series of events over the course of the academic year. Details on the St John’s English blog!
I’ve also got two books coming out. The edited collection Oceanic New York should be out sometime before BABEL 2015 in Toronto on Oct 9-11. My latest monograph, Shipwreck Modernity: Ecologies of Globalization, 1550 – 1719, will be out sometime later in the fall, probably around Dec 1. Both are labors of love and concealed hoards of time passed. I can barely wait to hear what everyone thinks of them! Writing and editing are such chronologically jumbled processes: these books contain slices and fragments from many different parts of the last decade or so of my life, coming together into physical forms this fall.
Partly because it’s great fun to be on the road with new books out or in the offing, I’m also planning several trips and events this year. Here’s the current round-up. Hope to see some of you at some of them! 
September 14, Rutgers University, seminar on “Early Modern Studies: State of the Art,” at which I’m co-presenting with David Glimp of UC Boulder. My materials, which will circulate in advance, comprise a works-in-progress series that I’ve gathered under the title “Error, Nature, and the Early Modern Anthropocene.”
September 30, Penn University, Medieval and Early Modern studies Seminar. I’m presenting on “#RisingWaters, Pirate Utopias, Antony and Cleopatra.”
October 9, BABEL 2015, Toronto: I’ll be the co-creator with the artist Patrick Mahon of A Book of Absent Whales, a multi-media assemblage that entangles whale bones, video feeds, poetry, Moby-Dick, and other things. It’ll be on display for all three days of BABEL 2015, though I’ll only be there on the Friday.
January 8-9, MLA, Austin TX: I’ll be on two panels. The first opening roundtable of the new MLA Ecocriticism and the Environmental Humanities Forum; the panel’s title is “Energy, Matter, Force” and my title is “Error.” I’ll also be on an Elemental Ecologies special session organized by Jeffrey Cohen, where I’ll speak about “Phlogiston” and probably also about metaphor as an ecological concept.
February 4-6, College of Charleston, SC: I’ll be talking about human and nonhuman networks that emerge through shipwreck on remote Atlantic islands in the early modern period at a small conference on “Marronage and Marooning in the early modern Atlantic world.”
March 23-26, SAA, New Orleans, LA: I’ll be co-leading with Matt Kozusko a Shakespeare Association seminar on “Shakespearean Communities.”
May 12-14, Kalamazoo, MI: I’m not positive this is firm yet, but I think I’ll be on a roundtable about “Play” sponsored by GWMEMSI, with many great people. If I’m not too exhausted by mid-May!
That list doesn’t include two semi-local events that I’d very much like to pop in on in nearby Boston: the ACLA from March 17-20, at which my friends Tobias Menley and Jesse Oak Taylor are putting together a great panel/roundtable on “Reading in the Anthropocene” that I’ll join if I possible can; and RSA from March 31-April 3, also in Boston. Spring is looking busy already but…
I’m also planning a party for Oceanic New York, hopefully on Th 11/5. Details to follow!
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