SCHOLARLY WORK

Rochelle’s interdisciplinary scholarship pursues the environmental humanities. More particularly, she explores how people have understood and expressed their relationship with the material world.

Her research takes her to the nineteenth-century emergence of professional science; the transatlantic aesthetics informing national landscapes; and the various forms of power and oppression now manifest in landscapes and culture. Her work also ventures into library archives and research in various fields, including art history, philosophy, and ecology. It takes her to various physical landscapes, particularly those of New England and the Susquehanna River Valley, and around the world. She frequently collaborates with students on research, pursuing environmental ideas and concerns as they shape both our immediate and global communities.

While her scholarly publications examine a range of figures, Henry David Thoreau and his nineteenth-century contemporaries are a focal point. Her first monograph, Passions for Nature: Nineteenth-Century America’s Aesthetics of Alienation (U of Georgia, 2009), centers on Susan Fenimore Cooper, an increasingly recognized 19th-Century writer who made key contributions to the rise of environmental thought. That book examines the aesthetic contexts of Cooper’s environmental work, including landscape art, landscape design theory, and the rise of professional science.

Her current book project is informed by over a decade of research in thirty-five archives across the U.S. and Europe and has been supported by fellowships from various organizations, including the American Antiquarian Society, the Idaho Humanities Council, and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH).

Rochelle regularly lectures for community organizations, museums, and libraries, on university campuses, at conferences and seminars, and via Zoom.

AUTHORED AND EDITED BOOKS

BOOKS THAT INCLUDE ROCHELLE’S ESSAYS