The author of Possessions: The History and Uses of Haunting in the Hudson Valley (Harvard UP 2003), her research and teaching interests include nineteenth-century American literature, American women writers, place, and the literature of cities.Resurrecting a series of cultural discourses that clustered around discrete vegetative types and tropes, this project uncovers a thoroughgoing, organic, specifically vegetative paradigm at the heart of U.S. culture, through which issues of nationhood, culture, personhood, and environment were predominantly imagined and negotiated.