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 INCLUDING ROCHELLE’S ESSAYS
LECTURES on SUSAN FENIMORE COOPER for FENIMORE ART MUSEUM
“Recovering Susan Fenimore Cooper's Environmentalism”
June 16, 2021
In this Zoom presentation, Rochelle Johnson explores Susan Fenimore Cooper—who she was, what she wrote, and, especially, what concerned her about the changing American landscapes of her time.
(Lecture co-sponsored by Fenimore Art Museum and Otsego Outdoors)
“Making Beauty in the Broken Places: Susan Fenimore Cooper and the Hudson River School”
April 14, 2022
In this Zoom presentation, Rochelle Johnson explores how literature and painting employed similar techniques to represent landscape change in the nineteenth century, with a special focus on Susan Fenimore Cooper and Thomas Cole.
Rochelle L. Johnson is a leading scholar of Susan Fenimore Cooper and, with her co-editor, has made Cooper’s environmental writings available to today’s readers.
“Susan Fenimore Cooper’s Reckoning with Native American Dispossession”
November 16, 2023
In this Zoom presentation, Rochelle Johnson explores Susan Fenimore Coopers complex interest in the Native Americans of her day. Paradoxically mired in the use of racist assumptions and appalled at the nation’s treatment of Native peoples’ cultures and lands, Cooper advocated for their rights at a time when few other Euromericans did.