James Finley teaches classes on early and nineteenth-century American literature, environmental literature, English Language Arts pedagogy, and disability studies. He is the editor of Henry David Thoreau in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2017) and his monograph, Abolition and the Rise of US Environmentalism: The Literature and Politics of Free Soil, will be published in August 2026 by the University of North Carolina Press. With Kristen Case, he is editing The Oxford Handbook of Henry David Thoreau. He serves as the Graduate Program Coordinator for the English MA.