James Searle

James Searle works in American literary studies, with concentrations in poetry, poetics, and modernism, and researches and teaches at the intersections of literature, philosophy and intellectual history. 

His dissertation, "Meeting Places: Entanglements of Art and Science in the American Literary Imagination," traces how Emerson, Du Bois, William Carlos Williams, and Muriel Rukeyser responded to the rise of modern science as collaborators in a shared imaginative enterprise; reading these writers alongside pragmatist philosophy and the history of science, it argues against simplified "two cultures" narratives, showing how a porous idea of science served, from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, as a generative resource for rethinking agency, history, and democratic culture. 

This work continues to shape two lines of research: one extends his interest in pragmatism and the history and philosophy of science toward non-reductive philosophical naturalism, asking how evolutionary theory, cognitive science and naturalist philosophy might enrich rather than flatten literary and cultural study; the other develops a critical approach to the questions large language models and AI raise for humanities teaching and cultural criticism, drawing on the pragmatist lineage from Peirce through Sellars and Brandom, science and technology studies and media theory. 

He directs the Writing Center and is a recipient of the Torch Professor award for excellence in undergraduate teaching, 2024.