Yosemite Valley from Mariposa Trail, c. 1865. Charles Leander Weed. Albumen print from wet collodion negative.

Cleveland Museum of Art, John Severance Fund 2002.43

My name is Tom Nurmi, and I’m Associate Professor of English Literature and Culture at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.

I write about the environmental humanities, the history of literature and science, and energy/waste studies.

Contact me: Tom.D.Nurmi at gmail [dot] com.

 Projects

Every Atom Weeps:

Energy, Race, and Resistance in the Federal Theater

(in progress)

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The Physics of American Literature, 1850-1900

(in progress)

Waylaid Light:

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Barnacle Theory

for

Melville Extracted

(Edinburgh University Press, Forthcoming, 2026)

Melville and Reproduction

for

The Routledge Companion to Herman Melville

Routledge Press, Forthcoming 2026

More

Melville’s Foams

for

The Oxford Handbook of Herman Melville (2025)

Sicario and the Cinematic Infrastructures of Necroplasticity

Film-Philosophy 28.3 (2025)

Edinburgh University Press

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Cautionary Stones:

Cinema, Infrastructure & the Necropolitics of Waste

(In progress)

More
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Uranium Cadillac:

Energy Imperialism & the Work of Indigenous Literatures

(in progress)

for

The Blackwell Companion to Herman Melville (2022)

Verdure

More
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Magnificent Decay:

Melville & Ecology

University of Virginia Press, 2020

Under the Sign of Nature:

Explorations in Environmental Humanities

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Mineral Melville

J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists 7:1 (2019)

Melville Among the Philosophers

Bloomsbury (2017)

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 Future Projects

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The Fire That Was:

Faulkner & the Cinders of History