Jerome Tharaud

Assistant Professor of English

Departments/Programs

American Studies
English
Environmental Studies

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	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

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.