Join author and editor Michael Jonik for an evening talk and book signing at the Ralph Waldo Emerson House to mark the recent publication of a collection of essays highlighting Emerson’s contemporary relevance.
Ralph Waldo Emerson's writings are at once timeless, timely, and untimely. They unseat our settled notions of individual and collective identity; they prompt us to see what is visionary in the lives we live now, and in the lives we might yet live. In this talk, Jonik will introduce The New Cambridge Companion to Ralph Waldo Emerson (Cambridge University Press, July 2026), in which he and a series of leading scholars have reassessed Emerson as an enduring figure for how we think about art, science, philosophy or poetry, and who still can speak to central issues of democracy and power, climate and race, or ethics and ethnicity within in our fractured America.
Dr. Michael Jonik is Professor of American Literature and Philosophy at the University of Sussex. He is the author of Herman Melville and the Politics of the Inhuman (Cambridge University Press, 2018), co-editor of The Oxford Handbook to Herman Melville (Oxford University Press, 2025), and editor of The New Cambridge Companion to Ralph Waldo Emerson (2026). He is preparing a new monograph on Thoreau and eco-philosophy, New Earths Expect Us: Thoreau's Radical Ecologies, as well as a collected volume, Melville Extracted, and a new Oxford World Classics edition of Herman Melville's Billy Budd and Short Fiction (Oxford, 2027). He is Book Reviews and Special Issues Editor for the journal Textual Practice, and co-founder of the British Association of Nineteenth-Century Americanists (BrANCA).
A reception will follow the talk, with books available for sale and signing. Due to limited capacity for this special event, registration is required. Attendance is free, with a suggested donation of $10 at the door to support the Emerson House.