About

T. Hugh Crawford is an Associate Professor in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech, having joined the faculty in 1996. He received his PhD in American Literature from Duke University in 1988. His research specializes in the cultural studies of science and technology, with published work on literature and medicine, cinema and science, medical imaging technologies, the novels of Herman Melville, and the poetry of William Carlos Williams. Crawford is a past president of the Society for Literature, Science and the Arts and has served as an editor for the journal Configurations: a Journal of Science, Technology and Culture published by the Johns Hopkins University Press. His academic interests include environmental studies, biopolitics, 21st-century environmental philosophy, environmentalism, ecocriticism, and the literature and culture of walking. Crawford has been recognized with awards such as the Georgia Tech ANAK Society Professor of the Year in 2012, the State of Georgia Board of Regents’ Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2011, and the Georgia Tech Don Bratcher Award for Human Relations in 2008.

Research topics

• Archaeology
• Environmental ethics
• Aesthetics
• Art
• Philosophy
• Geography
• Epistemology

Selected publications

• Apples and Grapes: Thoreau, Latour, and the Land

  Essays in Romanticism · 2024

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Aesthetics
  • Environmental ethics
  • Art

  After decades of studying technoscience as practiced across many disciplines, Bruno Latour turned his attention late in his career almost exclusively to the articulation of critical zones and politics during what he calls the “New Climactic Regime.” Using the same tools he honed throughout his career, the works from Facing Gaia onward try to lay out in clear terms the politics of climate change along with brief forays into possible forms of action. In his last books he presses the specific problem of how to live and attempt to know a specific geographical region without succumbing to isolationism and xenophobia. Many years previous, another irascible and humorous thinker worked similar soils. While Latour’s family has long labored in the Louis Latour vineyards, on the other side of the Atlantic, Henry David Thoreau was seeking wild apples for the long walk home. This essay examines how both thinkers produce a particular vision of a local understanding of place without the oversimplifications of the local/global binary.

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• Actor-Network Theory

  Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature · 2020-09-28 · 24 citations

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  Abstract Actor-network theory (ANT) is a methodology developed in the 1980s by scholars working primarily in the sociology of science and technology. It is a novel approach as it attempts to redefine actors not so much as willful or intentional agents but instead as any entity—human or nonhuman—that in some way influences or perturbs the activity of a techno-social system. Most effective when examining limited systems such as ship navigation, electrical network failures, and the like, ANT resists large generalizations and categories, including the very notion of the “social” which, according to actor-network theorists, is never an explanation but instead is that which must be explained. Well into the 21st century, practitioners have both embraced and critiqued ANT, but it remains a useful form of inquiry.

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• 3. The Paterson Plateau: Deleuze, Guattari and William Carlos Williams

  Edinburgh University Press eBooks · 2019-06-01 · 4 citations

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• Science Studies and Literary Theory

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2018-04-26

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• We started with a goal of transforming the curriculum for a MOOC, we ended up transforming ourselves

  Deakin Research Online (Deakin University) · 2017-01-01

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• In the vagueness of the low hum of insects in an August woodland: Walking with Whitehead

  SubStance · 2017-01-01

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  In the vagueness of the low hum of insects in an August woodland:Walking with Whitehead T. Hugh Crawford (bio) “Here then may be lived a life of the senses so pure, so untouched by any mode of apprehension but their own, that the body may be said to think.” —Nan Shepherd (105) Crossing a steep scree-field path demands concentration. The surface slips a little with each step and often, just a short way below, are large rocks or perhaps a cliff. Such experience is at some distance from the concentration intellectuals bring to the specifics of thought, the rigors of reason. Scree concentration works through feet and legs, hands and trekking poles. If it is thought, it is thinking with the body and the world traversed, thinking with surface, weather, time, and risk. I have walked thousands of miles as a long-distance backpacker and puzzled about this form of thinking which, because of the physical rigors, can be vague and fragmented but also brings glimmers of insight, unarticulated wisdom. Although he is not usually regarded as a philosopher overly concerned with embodiment, I have found Alfred North Whitehead’s work offers a set of concepts that opens up the domain of thinking as a process, one that includes risk, wonder, and a fundamentally different form of attention. Shifting the emphasis of the title of Isabelle Stengers’ monumental study (while at the same time using her as a guide), I want to think about thinking with Whitehead. He was born in a country of walkers: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Dickens and Woolf; Borrow, Clare, Thomas, and Fermor. In The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein describes her time with him at Lockeridge near the beginning of the Great War. For six weeks in 1914, they walked in “country still the same as in the days of Chaucer, with the green paths of the early britons that could still be seen in long stretches” (140). Whitehead’s was a walking family. Bertrand Russell, his former student and collaborator on Principia Mathematica, was close to his sons North and Alec, taking long excursions with them in the Lake District and Cornwall (Lowe 35). Lockeridge—the Whitehead’s country home in those years—is in Wiltshire near the Salisbury Plain, an area celebrated [End Page 48] for its many paths. Just to the north is Barbury castle, situated on the Ridgeway, which is considered one of the oldest roads in Europe and was surely one of the green roads visited that summer by the pilgrims Stein and Whitehead. Just a year earlier, in 1913, Edward Thomas published The Icknield Way, one of his many books detailing rambles about the old ways of England.1 He finished that walk on the Ridgeway without quite reaching the Wilterns. Nevertheless, Wiltshire is mentioned in the preface of that book and appears often in Thomas’s poems. Those walks gave Stein, Whitehead, and Thomas fresh air, a sense of a deep abiding past, but were also a form of thinking. Thinking, Walking, Risk Walking can be an act of solitude or companionship, but along with its human elements, even a short stroll down a well-trod green road brings a different awareness, including certain levels of risk, ranging from blisters or a soaking shower to encountering hostile humans or nonhumans, and, of course, getting lost. Ultimately, walking opens the possibility for many different forms of encounter. In her depiction of that summer, Stein describes how her understanding of Whitehead as a thinker and a human unfolded. Through the voice of her companion Alice B. Toklas, she places him in her pantheon of 20th-century geniuses, which includes Picasso and the ever-modest Gertrude herself. Their conversation unfolded on well-worn paths, a point that bears attention because of the physical disposition of the speakers. Unlike seated domestic talk in, for example, Stein’s atelier at 27 Rue de Fleurus in Paris, walkers do not face each other, nor do they always look at the same features of the path or surrounding landscape. In addition, physical exertion produces a competition for breath—to oxygenate blood or vibrate vocal cords. Conversation is not a simple give-and...

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• Walking with William Carlos Williams

  William Carlos Williams Review · 2017-01-01 · 1 citations

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  This article argues that the "Walking" section of William Carlos Williams's Paterson Book Two is usefully juxtaposed against comments Williams makes about his development of the variable foot ten years later.

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• <i>In the vagueness of the low hum of insects in an August woodland</i> : Walking with Whitehead

  SubStance · 2017-01-01

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• Williams, science, and the body

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2016-06-05 · 3 citations

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• Bruno Latour

  Palgrave Macmillan eBooks · 2015-08-28

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Frequent coauthors

• Bruno Latour

  1 shared

• Kerry Driscoll

  University of California, Berkeley

  1 shared

• Sara Lundquist

  1 shared

• Julio Marzán

  1 shared

• Barry Ahearn

  1 shared

• Peter Schmidt

  University of Mannheim

  1 shared

• Sallie Vaughn

  East Carolina University

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• Georgia Tech ANAK Society Professor of the Year (2012)
• State of Georgia Board of Regents’ Award for Excellence in T…
• Georgia Tech Don Bratcher Award for Human Relations (2008)