Phillip R. Polefrone is a PhD candidate whose work focuses on American fiction and ecology from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present. His dissertation (in progress), working title "Human/Nature: American Literary Naturalism and the Anthropocene," traces the intersections of American literary naturalism and proto-Anthropocenic theories of the time, arguing that the genre's unrecognized environmental ethos anticipates contemporary theories of a geological epoch defined by human activity. His work has appeared in Public Books, Politics/Letters, and is forthcoming from Extrapolation.