Coordinator, Environmental Humanities Minor & Professor
castelkm@jmu.edu
Contact Info
Office: Keezell 415
Professor of English
Coordinator, Environmental Humanities Minor
Spring 2024 Office Hours
MW 12:30-1:30pm, and by appointment
Specialization
Romantic-Era Literature, Anglophone Caribbean Literature, and Environmental Humanities
Education
Ph.D., English, Duke University
M.A., English, Bucknell University
B.A., English, Lebanon Valley College
Books
Robert Wedderburn, Abolition, and the Commons: Romanticism’s Black Geographies in the Cambridge Studies in Romanticism series, Cambridge University Press, forthcoming September 2024.
The Ecology of British Romantic Conservatism, 1790-1837, in the Palgrave Series on the Enlightenment, Romanticism, and Cultures of Print, edited by Anne Mellor and Clifford Siskin. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.
Essays and Book Chapters
“‘She trafficked on her own account’: Black Women and Abolitionist Geographies in Robert Wedderburn’s Horrors of Slavery (1824) and History of Mary Prince (1831).” European Romantic Review 35.2 (forthcoming June 2024).
Co-authored with Alastair Hunt, Ron Broglio, and Mario-Ortiz Robles, “Romanticism’s Fellow Creatures.” European Romantic Review 34.3 (2023): 317-28.
“Provision Grounds Against the Plantation: Robert Wedderburn’s The Axe Laid to the Root (1817).” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 25.1 (2021): 15-27.
“Multispecies Work in John Clare’s ‘Birds Nesting’ Poems” in Palgrave Advances in John Clare Studies, edited by Simon Kövesi and Erin Lafford. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020: 179-197.
“William Cobbett, ‘Resurrection Man!’: the Peterloo Massacre and the Bones of Tom Paine,” in Commemorating Peterloo: Violence, Resilience, and Claim-making during the Romantic Era, edited by Michael Demson and Regina Hewitt. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2019: 183-204.
“Anthropomorphism in the Anthropocene: Reassembling Wildlife Management Data in Bear 71.” Environmental Humanities 10.1 (2018): 171-186.
“Moles, Molehills, and Common Right in John Clare’s Poetry.” Studies in Romanticism 56.2 (2017): 157-176.
“Cobbett’s Commons: Monastic Economies in History of the Protestant Reformation.” European Romantic Review 26.5 (2015): 575-590.
“Romantic Conservatism in Burke, Wordsworth, and Wendell Berry.” SubStance #125, 40.2 (2011): 73-91.
“Why linger at the yawning tomb so long?”: The Ethics of Negative Capability in Keats’s Isabella and Hyperion.” Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas. 8.1 (2010): 23-38.
“Feminism to Ecofeminism: The Legacy of Gilbert and Gubar’s Readings of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and The Last Man.” The Madwoman in the Attic After Thirty Years, edited by Annette Federico. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2009: 76-94.
“Burke’s ‘Revolutionary Book’: Conservative Politics and Revolutionary Aesthetics in the Reflections.” Romanticism on the Net. 45 (2007).
“‘The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom’: Alternative Economies of Excess in Blake’s Continental Prophecies.” Papers on Language and Literature. 42.1 (2006): 3-24.
Public Humanities
“Food and Freedom in 19th-Century Jamaica,” Americas and Oceana Collections Blog, British Library, June 2022. https://blogs.bl.uk/americas/2022/06/food-and-freedom-in-19th-century-jamaica.html
“Free the Land,” a discussion about my research on the enclosure of the commons. With Good Reason, aired on 126 public radio stations, July 16-18, 2021. https://www.withgoodreasonradio.org/episode/london-fog-la-smog/?t=857&autoplay=1#s857
