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)
The Physics of American Literature, 1850-1900
(in progress)
Waylaid Light:
Barnacle Theory
for
Melville Extracted
(Edinburgh University Press, Forthcoming, 2026)
Melville and Reproduction
for
The Routledge Companion to Herman Melville
Routledge Press, Forthcoming 2026
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
Cautionary Stones:
Cinema, Infrastructure & the Necropolitics of Waste
(In progress)
Uranium Cadillac:
Energy Imperialism & the Work of Indigenous Literatures
(in progress)
for
The Blackwell Companion to Herman Melville (2022)
Verdure
Magnificent Decay:
Melville & Ecology
University of Virginia Press, 2020
Under the Sign of Nature:
Explorations in Environmental Humanities
Mineral Melville
J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists 7:1 (2019)
Melville Among the Philosophers
Bloomsbury (2017)