He earned his doctorate from Cornell University in 2001. An avid sailor, he has taught for SEA Semester—on the Atlantic, Pacific, and Caribbean—as well as for the Williams-Mystic Program in Maritime Studies. At Middlebury, he teaches courses on American nature writing, maritime literature, New England fiction, Shakespeare, and world literature. His book, Shakespeare's Ocean: An Ecocritical Exploration, published in 2012 by the University of Virginia Press, won the 2012 Northeast Modern Language Association Book Prize.