Since 1985, I’ve taught at SUNY Geneseo, where I served as interim provost in 2016-17 and chair of the English department from 2010 to 2015. I’m currently Professor of English and Director of the Center for Digital Learning at Geneseo. I teach courses in Victorian Literature, Humanities, and Digital Humanities.

Ongoing projects and recent publications

• Digital Thoreau, a web resource dedicated to helping readers approach the works of American author Henry David Thoreau the same way he tried to live life: deliberately. Digital Thoreau is home to multiple projects:
  • Walden: A Fluid-Text Edition, a scholarly edition of Thoreau’s best known work that enables readers to follow the author’s revisions across the seven drafts contained in the work’s roughly 1200-page manuscript, archived at the Huntington Library.
  • The Walden Manuscript Project, a collection of resources for exploring the digitized Walden manuscript, including a search tool for correlating the fluid-text edition with the edition’s transcription. The project is also home to essays aimed at understanding Thoreau’s revision process, the consequences of his revisions for the work’s meaning, and the material history of the manuscript.
  • The Readers’ Thoreau, a social network for annotating Thoreau’s works collaboratively.
  • The Days of Walter Harding, Thoreau Scholar, a digital archive maintained by Geneseo students that examines the life and work of Thoreau scholar and SUNY Geneseo Distinguished Professor of English Walter Harding.
• “Remediating Revision: Thoreau’s Walden and the Challenge of the Fluid-Text Edition,” in Edition als Vermittlung, ed. Anke Bosse and Artur R. Boelderl. De Gruyter, 2026, pp. 65-79. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783112212059-006
• "Encountering Walden" in Scholarly Editing Vol. 39 (co-author).
• Annotation, in Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: Concepts, Models, and Experiments, a book project of the Modern Language Association.
• Critical Digital Practices, a self-paced course/instructional resource designed to introduce some fundamental skills and concepts in computing while putting these in critical perspective.
• English @ SUNY Geneseo, a learning and shared-interest network built with Commons In a Box, a free plugin for the open-source blogging platform WordPress created and maintained by City University of New York and CUNY Graduate Center.

Assorted open courses

• Spring 2026: Literature and Literary Study in the Digital Age
• Fall 2019: Victorian Connexions
• Fall 2018: Reader and Text: Fluid Readers, Fluid Texts
• Fall 2017: Into the Woods: Experiments in Community, Sustainability, and the Examined Life (with Debra Schleef, University of Mary Washington)
• Spring 2016: Western Humanities II
• Fall 2014: Major Authors: Charles Dickens

Social

Find me at:

• @WhatTheDickens (less and less)
• @WhatTheDickens@mastodon.online (more and more)
• @DigitalThoreau
• @DigitalThoreau@hcommons.social