Ashton Nichols
John J. Curley '60 and Ann Conser Curley '63 Faculty Professor of English Language and Literature

phone: 717.245.1359
fax: 717.245.1942
nicholsa@dickinson.edu

I teach courses in Romanticism, nineteenth-century literature, literature and the environment, and nature writing. I am interested in the relationship between literature and natural history in the century before Darwin's On the Origin of Species. I am a founding faculty member of Dickinson in the Galápagos, a program that takes Dickinson students and faculty to Ecuador and the Galápagos Islands, the site of Darwin's earliest research into natural selection. In addition, I have served as the director of the Dickinson Arts and Humanities Program in London and Norwich, England. 

My current scholarly project, A Romantic Natural History explores literary and scientific texts from 1750 to 1859. This research traces our current environmental concerns to their sources in earlier ideas about relations between human beings and the natural world. The project is under development at the Romantic Natural History website. Link to my personal homepage for additional information. Click on the book covers below for information about my work.