James Finleys teaching focuses on early and nineteenth-century American literature, environmental literature, English Language Arts pedagogy, and the literature of the abolitionist movement in the United States. He is the editor of Henry David Thoreau in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2017) and is at work on a monograph tentatively titled "Free Soil Abolition: Slavery, Race, and Ecology in Antebellum America." Other scholarship has been published in ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, The New North Star, andThe Concord Saunterer: A Journal of Thoreau Studies, as well as in multiple edited collections.