Nathan Schmidt is a Ph.D. student in the Department of English at IU Bloomington. His project for Platform 2020 is an in-depth investigation of John Muir's time in Indiana and how it affected his conceptions of the environment in the years right before his famous "thousand mile walk" that eventually led him to the mountains of California. Nathan's dissertation research focuses on American literature around the turn of the twentieth century, specifically the intersection of technological narratives and environmentalist discourse. As a scholar of the environmental humanities, his work brings together posthuman critical theory and the history of science.
