Elected Fellow of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 2010
College of Liberal Arts Faculty Achievement Award, Oregon State University, September 2006
Distinguished Achievement Award, Ralph Waldo Emerson Society, May 2005
Director, Center for the Humanities, Oregon State University, 2001-present
Named University Distinguished Professor of American Literature, Oregon State University, 1994
President, Ralph Waldo Emerson Society, 1998-99; Program Chair, 1993-95
Named Oregon Professor of English, Oregon State University [Endowed Professorship], 1991
Director, National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar for School Teachers, 1987, 1988, 1989, 1990, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994, 1996
Author of “Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller and Transcendentalism” [annual review of work in the field] for American Literary Scholarship (Duke University Press), 1988-2008.
Editorial Boards: ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment; Journal of Unitarian Universalist History; ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance, 2008-2012
Chair, Panel on Theological Education, Unitarian Universalist Assoc., Boston, 1995-2001
Fulbright Guest Professor, University of Heidelberg, Germany, 1984-85
Faculty Excellence Award for Teaching, Oregon State Board of Higher Education, 1984
American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship, 1983-84
President, Pacific Northwest American Studies Association, 1982-84
National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, 1979-80