14 Facts About Timothy Morton

Timothy Bloxam Morton was born on 19 June 1968 and is a professor and Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University.

Timothy Morton uses the term to explain objects so massively distributed in time and space as to transcend localization, such as climate change and styrofoam.

Timothy Morton has written extensively about the literature of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Shelley, Romanticism, diet studies, and ecotheory.

Timothy Morton is a faculty member in the Synthetic Landscapes postgraduate program at the Southern California Institute of Architecture.

In 1995, Timothy Morton published Shelley and the Revolution in Taste: The Body and the Natural World, an extension of the ideas presented in their doctoral dissertation.

Timothy Morton has edited two critical volumes on the Shelleyan corpus.

From 2000 to 2004, Timothy Morton published three works dealing with the intersection of food and cultural studies.

Timothy Morton cites the "trade winds topos" in Milton's Paradise Lost as an example, concluding that Milton prefigures the symbolic use of spice in later works by presenting Satan's journey from Hell to Chaos as a parallel to the travels of spice traders.

Since 2009, Timothy Morton has engaged in a sustained project of ecological critique, primarily enunciated in two works, Ecology Without Nature and The Ecological Thought, through which they problematize environmental theory from the standpoint of ecological entanglement.

In Ecology Without Nature, Timothy Morton proposes that an ecological criticism must be divested of the bifurcation of nature and civilization, or the idea that nature exists as something that sustains civilization, but exists outside of society's walls.

Art is an important theme in The Ecological Thought, a "prequel" to Ecology Without Nature, in which Timothy Morton proposes the concept of 'dark ecology' as a means of expressing the "irony, ugliness, and horror" of ecology.

Timothy Morton became involved with object-oriented ontology after their ecological writings were favorably compared with the movement's ideas.

Against traditional causal philosophies, Timothy Morton argues that causality is an aesthetic dimension of relations between objects, wherein sensory experience does not indicate direct access to reality, but rather an uncanny interruption of the false ontic equilibrium of an interobjective system.

Timothy Morton's approach has sparked a contentious debate, with some arguing it's overly harsh and disempowering.