Current Research:
I am currently thinking and writing about the importance and challenges of connecting literary studies with contemporary forms of non-reductive philosophical naturalism. I want to explore how evolutionary theory, cognitive science, and naturalist philosophy intersect with the environmental humanities and posthumanist theory and criticism. Building on my longstanding interests in pragmatism and naturalism, I have been reading and writing about the emergence of LLMs and their place in the longer history of Artificial Intelligence. These new technologies require that humanists think more clearly about the distinguishing features of human intelligence, agency, and normativity. A broadly naturalistic and pragmatist view of our evolved capacities as knowers and doers–as well as an appreciation of the importance of aesthetics and cultural criticism–is essential for this task.
For Fall 2025 and Spring 2026, I am a co-organizer of a campus StAR grant focused on “Reimagining English Studies” in the context of the rapid spread of GenAI–as both technology and ideology–in the field of higher ed. In addition to organizing several talks and workshops, this grant entails developing a sequence of AI-aware assignments for the teaching of Undergraduates in English. Focusing on assignment design and assessment, my co-organizers and I have looked at the ways digital and multimedia tools might be used to engage students in patient and critical humanistic learning.
Dissertation:
Meeting Places: Entanglements of Art and Science in the American Literary Imagination
Drawing on the work of historians of science and technology and a body of pragmatist and process-based philosophy, my dissertation investigates how four American writers—Ralph Waldo Emerson, W.E.B. Du Bois, William Carlos Williams, and Muriel Rukeyser—creatively and critically responded to the rise of modern science in the opening decades of the twentieth century. Far from treating the aesthetic and the scientific as axiomatically opposed, these writers explored what Rukeyser, in her biography of the American scientist Josiah Willard Gibbs, termed the ‘meeting place’ between art and science. As I show, this meeting place was a vital site for critical and imaginative reflection about a vexed series of ethical, historical, and epistemic problematics central to America’s modernization. Working against simplified narratives of the emergence of the ‘two cultures,’ I detail how a porous, protean idea of science simultaneously motivated aesthetic experimentation and served as a generative foil for developing compelling critiques of capitalist industrialization and the institutionalization of knowledge. By focusing on the generative and fraught entanglements between the aesthetic, philosophical, and scientific in each writer’s oeuvre, I not only offer new readings of their literary texts but highlight their relevance in contemporary debates focused on reimagining the relationship between humanistic and scientific disciplinary practices inside and outside of the classroom.
Areas of Interest:
American Literature, Poetics, Pragmatism, History and Philosophy of Science, Critical Theory, Philosophical Naturalism
James Searle 