Squamscott River, Exeter, New Hampshire, March 2026

The Fifth Annual Greater Gulf Symposium, March 29-31, 2026

(L to R) Rebecca Boone (LU COAS Dean), Keagan LeJeune (McNeese St), Cory Diane Ashby (independent scholar), Chaney Hill (Rice), Nina Gjoci (LU Center for Resiliency), Jimmy Bryan (LU Center for History and Culture), Paula Buchanan (Columbia), Paul Del Bosque (UT Austin), Marquel Sennet (Houston), Wil Carr (NC State), Sherry Peddy (LU Events)

The 2026 Greater Gulf Symposium convened on the topic of "Storytelling in the Greater Gulf." Keagan LeJeune (McNeese State, English) presented the keynote talk, and we workshopped six essays by Fellows Paula Buchanan (Columbia, Disaster & Emergency Management), Wil Carr (NC State, Communications & Media), Paul Del Bosque (UT Austin, Mexican American Studies), Cory Diane Ashby (independent scholar, Musicology), Chaney Hill (Rice, English), and Marquel Sennet (Houston, History). We toured the ExxonMobil refinery at in Beaumont and explored the Neches River aboard the Ivory Bill, guided by the Big Thicket Association.

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Presented at the Society for the Study of the American Gothic Meeting, March 21, 2026

I presented “A Fierce Wasting Spirit: The Feral Sublime as Ecogothic Defiance against US Expansion” at the second meeting of the Society for the Study of the American Gothic at Salem, MA. In August 1826, torrential storms raged over the Notch in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. There, the Willey family operated an inn—the lone structure in that narrow pass. On the night of the 28th, rains brought down a landslide, killing nine people. Newspapers across the nation reported on the Willey House disaster, and writers like Lydia Sigourney (1828), Granville Mellen (1833), Nathaniel Hawthorne (1835), and others perceived within the storm clouds and muddy earthfall a dark and angry force of nature—a kind of feral sublime that Sigourney described as a “Fierce wasting Spirit.” Although each author emphasized the misanthropic mood of the feral sublime, they further specified its animus against human ambition and greed—especially in the forms of exploitive capitalism and destroying imperialism. The research is part of my book manuscript This Empire Grim. On the same trip, I enjoyed the opportunity to research the Lydia Sigourney papers and photograph the 1821 edition of William Cullen Bryant's Poems at the Watkinson Library, Trinity College.