Timothy Morton

Timothy Morton (Timothy Bloxam Morton, born 1968) is an American thinker and professor of English at Rice University. A member of the object-oriented philosophy movement, Morton connects that current with ecological studies, which makes them a reference point in contemporary debates about nature and environmental crisis.

Morton studied at Oxford, earning a doctorate with a dissertation on diet in the work of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Before joining Rice, they taught at the universities of Davis, New York and Colorado. Early work examined Romantic food culture and the role of spice in literature. From 2009 onward, Morton focused on ecological critique in Ecology Without Nature and The Ecological Thought, questioning the separation between nature and civilization. For Morton, climate change and styrofoam are hyperobjects: entities so widely distributed in time and space that they cannot be localized in one place. Their concept of the mesh describes a network of connections without a center, in which beings seem stranger the more we know them.