Sheila Byers is a Drue Heinz Postdoctoral Fellow in the Faculty of English. She works on early American literature from the colonial period through the nineteenth century from a perspective that integrates the environmental humanities and the histories of science and philosophy. Her current book project focuses on settler colonial and Indigenous depictions of swarming insects and argues that the experience of the swarm is one of ecological relations with the natural world. Drawing on works by writers including Jonathan Edwards, William Bartram, and David Cusick, the book explores the implications that ecological thinking has for various environmental theories, epistemological systems, and philosophies of identity.
