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ULM English professor translates science-and-literature research for the classroom

Published October 30, 2024

Patrick Morgan

CAPTION: ULM Assistant Professor of English Dr. Patrick Morgan was recently featured in publications from Princeton University Press and Oxford University Press.


MONROE, LAImagine sitting down to analyze a poem in your college English class, then being handed a rock as well. That’s what it’s like taking a class with Dr. Patrick Morgan, Assistant Professor of English at the University of Louisiana Monroe. A lesson Morgan teaches on reading rocks and poetry has been published by Princeton University Press as a book chapter titled, “Rock Your Classroom,” in The Pocket Instructor: Writing. This lesson stems from his larger commitment to interdisciplinary research, studying the connections between geology and literature, including two additional book chapters published recently by Oxford University Press.

The Pocket Instructor: Writing compiles fifty active learning lessons from around the country introducing students to academic writing across the humanities and sciences. As the volume’s editors write, “To teach academic writing is to teach thinking—that is to say, every step that goes into creating an insightful, rigorously argued essay. Success lies in teaching students not simply to answer questions but to ask their own, to follow their curiosity and question their assumptions” (2). The book contains instructions and reflections for how to teach writing across every stage of the process, from building an idea, drafting, revising, and transferring academic writing into other forms of writing. Although the lessons are geared toward the college classroom, they are also adaptable to high school classrooms.

“My lesson focuses on teaching students different ways of writing in the humanities and sciences, via poems and rocks,” says Morgan. “The lesson gets students actively thinking about what it means to write about primary texts in different disciplines. How do literary scholars analyze a poem and how do geologists analyze a rock? How can juxtaposing these two approaches help us think about the larger connections and differences across the humanities and sciences?”

As Morgan explains in his chapter, “I’ve found this exercise especially valuable because it challenges students’ conceptions of a ‘text,’ broadening the horizon of what qualifies as a primary object of study. [...] By seriously considering sedimentary rocks as texts, we can illuminate central issues regarding interpretation, such as intention and how we read ‘the human’ vs. ‘the non-human.’ Ultimately, I want students to walk away with a larger sense of the kinds of things poems say, the kinds of things rocks say, and the ability to radically reimagine the way they look at a text” (38-39).

“So seamlessly does Dr. Morgan’s exercise progress from the ‘pithy’ to the profound that, by the end of a ‘rockin’ class, students will marvel at the transformative power of writing,” says Dr. Janet Haedicke, Professor of English at the University of Louisiana Monroe. “I suspect that, long after such a class, they will be reading themselves and their worlds as texts with beautifully ‘porous dotted lines.’”

The published lesson “clearly shows that fundamental scholarship is not disconnected from applied scholarship,” says Dr. John M. Pratte, Dean of the College of Arts, Education, and Sciences. Indeed, this lesson has been published around the same time as two other book chapters focusing on geology’s connections with literature. Published this summer, TheOxford Handbook of Ralph WaldoEmerson contains Morgan’s chapter about the way Emerson connected geology with his fight against slavery. The chapter is titled, “TranscendentalGeologies:Emerson, Anti-Slavery, and theKairosof Deep Time.” Later this semester, a long-term project comprehensively summarizing the history of American literature’s relationship with geology will be published as a chapter, “Geology in American Literature,” in The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature.

If the history of science and its connections with literature intrigues you, read more about Morgan’s research in the links below.

Links for Further Reading

“Rock Your Classroom” inThePocketInstructor:Writing: <>

“TranscendentalGeologies:Emerson, Anti-Slavery, and theKairosof Deep Time” in The Oxford Handbook of Ralph WaldoEmerson: <>

“Geology in American Literature” inThe Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature [to be published later this semester, link will become active upon publication]: < >

For further information, please contact Patrick Morgan at pmorgan@ulm.edu.