Coordinator, Environmental Humanities Minor & Professor
castelkm@jmu.edu
Contact Info
Spring 2026 Office Hours
By appointment only
Office: Keezell 415
Specialization
Romantic-Era Literature, Anglophone Caribbean Literature, and Environmental Humanities
Education
Ph.D., English, Duke University
M.A., English, Bucknell University
B.A., English, Lebanon Valley College
Coordinator of the Environmental Humanities Minor
Books
Robert Wedderburn, Abolition, and the Commons: Romanticism’s Black Geographies. Cambridge Studies in Romanticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2025.
The Ecology of British Romantic Conservatism, 1790-1837, in the Palgrave Series on the Enlightenment, Romanticism, and Cultures of Print, edited by Anne Mellor and Clifford Siskin. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.
Essays & Book Chapters
“‘She trafficked on her own account’: Black Women and Abolitionist Geographies in Robert Wedderburn’s Horrors of Slavery (1824) and History of Mary Prince (1831).” European Romantic Review 35.2 (2024): 321-39. Winner of the Fredrick Burwick Article Prize.
Co-authored with Alastair Hunt, Ron Broglio, and Mario-Ortiz Robles, “Romanticism’s Fellow Creatures.” European Romantic Review 34.3 (2023): 317-28.
“Provision Grounds Against the Plantation: Robert Wedderburn’s The Axe Laid to the Root (1817).” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 25.1 (2021): 15-27.
“Multispecies Work in John Clare’s ‘Birds Nesting’ Poems” in Palgrave Advances in John Clare Studies, edited by Simon Kövesi and Erin Lafford. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020: 179-197.
“William Cobbett, ‘Resurrection Man!’: the Peterloo Massacre and the Bones of Tom Paine,” in Commemorating Peterloo: Violence, Resilience, and Claim-making during the Romantic Era, edited by Michael Demson and Regina Hewitt. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2019: 183-204.
“Anthropomorphism in the Anthropocene: Reassembling Wildlife Management Data in Bear 71.” Environmental Humanities 10.1 (2018): 171-186.
“Moles, Molehills, and Common Right in John Clare’s Poetry.” Studies in Romanticism 56.2 (2017): 157-176.
“Cobbett’s Commons: Monastic Economies in History of the Protestant Reformation.” European Romantic Review 26.5 (2015): 575-590.
“Romantic Conservatism in Burke, Wordsworth, and Wendell Berry.” SubStance #125, 40.2 (2011): 73-91.
“Why linger at the yawning tomb so long?”: The Ethics of Negative Capability in Keats’s Isabella and Hyperion.” Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas. 8.1 (2010): 23-38.
“Feminism to Ecofeminism: The Legacy of Gilbert and Gubar’s Readings of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and The Last Man.” The Madwoman in the Attic After Thirty Years, edited by Annette Federico. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2009: 76-94.
“Burke’s ‘Revolutionary Book’: Conservative Politics and Revolutionary Aesthetics in the Reflections.” Romanticism on the Net. 45 (2007).
“‘The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom’: Alternative Economies of Excess in Blake’s Continental Prophecies.” Papers on Language and Literature. 42.1 (2006): 3-24.
Public Humanities
“Food and Freedom in 19th-Century Jamaica,” Americas and Oceana Collections Blog, British Library, June 2022. https://blogs.bl.uk/americas/2022/06/food-and-freedom-in-19th-century-jamaica.html
“Free the Land,” a discussion about my research on the enclosure of the commons. With Good Reason, aired on 126 public radio stations, July 16-18, 2021. https://www.withgoodreasonradio.org/episode/london-fog-la-smog/?t=857&autoplay=1#s857
