Part of a larger project which claims that space figurations play a fundamental role in Thoreau’s numerous attempts to reform the American Self, Ratiu contributes to recent scholarship analyzing the importance of land surveying to literary studies. By analyzing surveying as a literary trope in Walden and “Walking,” Ratiu suggests that Thoreau’s incorporation of surveying into his literary texts amounts to a critique of the pervading ideology of antebellum America and argues that his surveying skills reverberate through his writing in a way that responds to shifts in space and land configurations between colonial and antebellum America.

Ratiu received his Ph.D. from SUNY Albany.