Professor of English
Sanders 206
x5662
Contact H. Daniel Peck
John Guy Vassar Professor of English H. Daniel Peck is Director of Vassar's new Environmental Studies Program. His concern with environmental studies grows from his work on landscape in American literature, as expressed particularly in his books Thoreau's Morning Work and A World by Itself: The Pastoral Moment in Cooper's Fiction, both published by Yale University Press. Professor Peck brought this concern, in 1997, to his directorship of an NEH Summer Institute for College and University Faculty titled "The Environmental Imagination: Issues and Problems in American Nature Writing." He serves on the editorial board of ISLE (Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment) and on the Board of Directors of the John Burroughs Association. In July of 2001, Professor Peck will give the keynote address at the 13th International James Fenimore Cooper Seminar and Summer Course, whose theme is "The Environment as Moral Force: Yesterday and Tomorrow."
Professor Peck's other publications on Thoreau include two Penguin Classics editions, A Year in Thoreau's Journal: 1851 and A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. Collections of essays that he has edited include The Green American Tradition (LSU) and New Essays on The Last of the Mohicans (Cambridge). He is the editor of the Oxford World's Classics edition of Cooper's Deerslayer and the forthcoming Washington Square Press Enriched Classics edition of The Last of the Mohicans. A contributor to the Cambridge Literary History of the United States, Professor Peck is a past chairman of the Modern Language Association's Division on Nineteenth-Century American Literature. He is the recipient of two NEH Senior Research Fellowships and an ACLS Fellowship.
