Wesley T. Mott

Wesley T. Mott, Professor of English at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI), organized the Ralph Waldo Emerson Society in 1989. Since 1990 he has published the international scholarly organization's newsletter, Emerson Society Papers, at WPI. Currently President-Elect of the Emerson Society, he has served on the board of the Thoreau Society for sixteen years and is series editor of "The Spirit of Thoreau," which presents excerpts from Thoreau on a variety of topics for a wide audience. Mott has published several books on the Transcendentalists and antebellum New England literature, including The Strains of Eloquence: Emerson and His Sermons (Penn State, 1989). He edited volume 4 of The Complete Sermons of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Missouri, 1992) and the Encyclopedia of Transcendentalism and Biographical Dictionary of Transcendentalism (both Greenwood, 1996), co-edited Emersonian Circles: Essays in Honor of Joel Myerson (Rochester, 1997), edited the three-volume American Renaissance in New England for the Dictionary of Literary Biography (Gale, 2000-2001), and compiled Bonds of Affection: Thoreau on Dogs and Cats (Massachusetts, 2005).

Presently an editor of the Journal in the Princeton Thoreau Edition, he has written popular articles on such topics as New England history, energy conservation, and the Beatles. He is a member of the advisory boards of the Louisa May Alcott Society, the Walden Woods Project, and the Boston University Alumni Association. Beyond the classroom, he has advised projects by WPI student teams at the Thoreau Institute, Fruitlands Museums, Old Sturbridge Village, the Vineyard Museum, and the British Museum and Science Museum in London.