Dissertation: "Science, Politics, and Soul-Making: The Romantic Encounter with Climate Change"

Certified Spring 2017

Michael Verderame defended his dissertation, "Science, Politics, and Soul-Making: The Romantic Encounter with Climate Change," under the direction of Gillen Wood, in May 2017. The dissertation explores the treatment of weather and climate in British literature and culture of the long nineteeth century.

The Romantic movement in British literature coincided with new breakthroughs in meteorology and climatology, allowing scientists for the first time to understand the earth’s weather as a global, interactive system, as well as to begin to trace the possible influence of human civilization upon the climate system. The end of the Little Ice Age, the acceleration of anthropogenic global warming resulting from the Industrial Revolution, and a series of volcanic eruptions causing major shocks to the global climate system all provided reference points for Romantic writers such as William Cowper, Percy Shelley,  John Keats, and John Ruskin, to challenge and rethink the relationship between humans and their climate in ways that offer insightful directions for coping with our contemporary climate emergency.     

Michael completed a graduate minor in Gender and Women's Studies, and also holds an M.S. in Library and Information Science from the University of Illinois and a J.D. from Tulane Law School. His writing has appeared in the Modern American Poetry Site, the AAUP Journal of Academic Freedom, Studies in Romanticism, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment, College Literature, Eighteenth-Century Theory and Interpretation, Green Theory and Praxis, Kritik, Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net, and Climate Change: An Encyclopedia of Climate and History (ABC-Clio). He teaches and writes in Chicago, where he lives with his wife Dena and their newborn son Nathan.