James Finley teaches classes on early and nineteenth-century American literature, environmental literature, English Language Arts pedagogy, and disability studies. He is the author of Abolition and the Rise of US Environmentalism: The Literature and Politics of Free Soil (University of North Carolina Press, 2026) and editor of Henry David Thoreau in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2017). With Kristen Case, he is editing The Oxford Handbook of Henry David Thoreau.