Lecture on Twain’s complicated view of the Hawaiian landscape now available

As part of the Chemung County Historical Society’s Mark Twain Lectures Series, Ryan Heryford presented “‘Now don’t any of you gentlemen get my bones mixed up with yours’” on September 2, 2021.

Ryan Heryford is an Assistant Professor of Environmental Literature in the Department of English at California State University, East Bay, where he teaches courses in nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature, with a focus in ecocriticism and cultural narratives of environmental justice. He has published, or has forthcoming articles, on environmental thought in the works of William Faulkner, Mark Twain, Emily Dickinson, Édouard Glissant, and M. NourbeSe Philip. His scholarship has been supported by the William Faulkner Society, the Emily Dickinson International Society, and the University of California Center for Global California Studies. His current book-length project, “The Snugness of Being:” Vitalism and Decay in Nineteenth Century American Literature, explores the influence of nineteenth-century environmental and biomedical philosophy on constructions of self and subjectivity within the works of Mark Twain, Emily Dickinson, and Herman Melville.

Professor Heryford gave a talk at the 2019 Quarry Farm Symposium “Mark Twain and Nature.”

• Ryan Heryford, “‘the breath of flower that perished’: The Imperial Ecologies of Mark Twain’s Early Letters” (October 5, 2019 – Quarry Farm Barn) (Lecture Images). His talk can be found HERE.

The next Mark Twain lecture will take place on Thursday, September 16 at 7:00PM. More information can be found HERE.