Pierre Laclede Honors College

Joseph Carroll

 

photo of carrollJoe Carroll received his Ph. D. in Comparative Literature from the University of California at Berkeley in 1981 and joined the UMSL faculty as an assistant professor of English in 1985. He has written books on two authors, Matthew Arnold and Wallace Stevens, and also on a theoretical topic, evolutionary psychology and literature. Since the early 1990s, he has specialized in Darwinian studies, and he recently produced an edition of Darwin's Origin of Species. He likes to make up interdisciplinary courses about fiction, psychology, biology, and movies. In the English department, he teaches literary theory, Victorian fiction, and short stories. In Honors, he teaches whatever he can think up that he hopes will be intriguing to curious students. One of his big theoretical ideas is that Cognition is a whole Behavioral System, that it correlates closely with Curiosity, that Curiosity is a major personality factor, and that indulging one's curiosity is one of the chief privileges of being human-right along side walking upright, using language, and taking advantage of the opposable thumb.