Laura Dassow Walls is Professor Emerita at the University of Notre Dame, where she taught American literature, particularly the American Transcendentalists, and the history and theory of ecological thought. Previously she taught at Lafayette College and the University of South Carolina. Her biography Henry David Thoreau: A Life (Chicago 2017) received Phi Beta Kappa’s Christian Gauss Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Biography. Her other books include the award-winning Passage to Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America (2009); Emerson’s Life in Science: The Culture of Truth (2003); and Seeing New Worlds: Henry David Thoreau and Nineteenth-Century Natural Science (1995). Currently she is working on a literary biography of the American writer Barry Lopez