Jerome Tharaud
Degrees
University of Chicago, Ph.D.University of Chicago, B.A.
Expertise
Early American and 19th-Century U.S. literature and culture; American religious history; print culture and media; art history and visual culture; geography and literature; cultural and environmental history of American landscapes; the American West.Profile
Professor Tharaud teaches courses on American literature and culture from the colonial through the contemporary periods. His book, "Apocalyptic Geographies: Religion, Media, and the American Landscape" (Princeton University Press, 2020) explores how 19th-century Americans used the landscape to help understand spiritual life, from the state of their souls to the fate of the globe. His next book project, "Western Salvage: Scarcity and Adaptation in the Modern American West," examines Western literature and art in order to think about how human cultures have adapted to conditions of scarcity (both in terms of material resources like water as well as cultural resources like information), and what lessons that history might offer us for living in an age of climate crisis.Courses Taught
| AMST/ENG | 47a | Frontier Visions: The West in American Literature and Culture |
| ENG | 1a | Introduction to Literary Studies |
| ENG | 6a | The American Renaissance |
| ENG | 28a | Environmental Literature in an Age of Extinction |
| ENG | 40b | The Birth of the Short Story: Gods, Ghosts, Lunatics |
| ENG | 110b | The Great American Picture Book |
| ENG | 136a | Imagining Apocalypse |
| ENG | 146a | Reading the American Revolution |
| ENG | 154b | Spirit Worlds: Religion and Early American Literature |
| ENG | 247a | American Literary Geographies |
| ENG | 250a | Religion and Literature |
Scholarship
Tharaud, Jerome. "Western Salvage: Scarcity, Settler Colonialism, and Adaptation in Wallace Stegner's Wolf Willow." ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment (2021). (forthcoming)
Tharaud, Jerome. "The Metahybrid Environment: Rewilding, Religion, and the Buffalo Commons Novel." Western American Literature 55. 4 (2021): 351-386.
Tharaud, Jerome. Apocalyptic Geographies: Religion, Media, and the American Landscape. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2020.
Tharaud, Jerome. "Housebreaking." Montana Quarterly Fall 2015: 60-65.
Tharaud, Jerome. "Evangelical Space: 'The Oxbow,' Religious Print, and the Moral Landscape in America." American Art 28. 3 (2014): 52-75.
Tharaud, Jerome. "'So far heathen': Thoreau, the Missionary Memoir, and Walden's Cosmic Modernity." ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 59. 4 (2013): 618-61.
Tharaud, Jerome. "The Evangelical Press, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and the Human Medium." Arizona Quarterly 69. 2 (2013): 25-54.
Tharaud, Jerome. "Emerson's Geographical Imagination: Private Journeys of Grief and Healing through the American Landscape." (2003): Ralph Waldo Emerson: Bicentenary Appraisals. Ed. Tharaud, Barry. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2006.
Tharaud, Jerome. "Emerson's Geographical Imagination: Private Journeys of Grief and Healing through the American Landscape." Nineteenth-Century Prose 30. 1/2 (2003): 102-35.