Scenes of Attention: Essays on Mind, Time, and the Senses
Columbia University Press, 2023
An interdisciplinary collection of new work on the technology, history, and phenomenology of human attention. Co-edited with Justin E. H. Smith.
Twelve Theses on Attention
The Friends of Attention and Princeton University Press, 2022
Collaboratively authored, and co-edited with Stevie Knauss. “Soft-spoken fire, generous in heat and light…” Yves Citton.
In Search of the Third Bird: Exemplary Essays from The Proceedings of ESTAR(SER), 2001-2021
Strange Attractor Press, December 2021 (distributed by MIT)
A scholarly metafiction that circles the absent presence of “experience” in the human sciences. Conjectural historiography as ergodic literature. (Hal Foster: “A very strange book.”) A collaboration.
KEYWORDS;…Particularly Relevant to Academic Life, &c.
IHUM Books and Princeton University Press, 2018
A co-authored and co-edited lexicon for intellectual life on campus (and beyond). Ambrose Bierce meets Raymond Williams.
The Sounding of the Whale: Science and Cetaceans in the Twentieth Century
University of Chicago Press. January 2012.
How did whales become the poster organism for the modern environmental movement? A close study of the changing understanding of—and the changing meanings ascribed to—these strange beasts over the last century.
Trying Leviathan
Princeton University Press. November 2007.
A study of classification and taxonomy in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, focused on the whale as an anomalous organism.
A Trial By Jury
Knopf. September 2001; Japanese edition, 2006.
A narrative non-fiction account of a trial in Manhattan.
Descartes and the Hyperbolic Quest: Lens-Making in the Seventeenth Century
American Philosophical Society, Transactions series. Vol. 95 (3): 2005.
A book-length study of optics, lens craft, and Cartesian thought.
Masters of All They Surveyed: Exploration, Geography, and a British El Dorado
University of Chicago Press. September 2000.
A history of geographical exploration in South America, and a study of the entanglements of science and imperialism.