Laura Dassow Walls

American professor of English literature

Walls has researched the intersections of literature and science in the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Alexander von Humboldt and related authors. She specializes in American Transcendentalism—especially Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, transatlantic romanticism, literature and science, and environmental literature and ecocriticism. Walls is the author of "Henry David Thoreau: A Life", "The Passage to Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America", "Emerson's Life in Science: The Culture of Truth" and "Seeing New Worlds: Henry David Thoreau and Nineteenth-Century Natural Science".