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Q. What trait do you most admire in Swedenborg? A. His uncompromising discipline-the sheer volume of his writing, indexing, self-cataloguing, is humbling.

If Swedenborg were alive today I would...Ask him about english literature. His thoughts and opinions regarding the poetry of Shakespeare and Pope; why his 'Worship and Love of God' has so many Miltonic echoes, decades after he mentions first reading Paradise Lost.

Heaven or Hell? "Heaven is here, heaven is now" to paraphrase D.T. Suzuki's comment when he was asked about Swedenborg's afterlife. My own life is rarely blessed enough for heaven ever to be strictly an "either/or" option — it's more of a state where heaven and hell are at constant odds, struggling with each other. But that's the human condition.

The inspiration for working on 'England's Forgotten Philosopher: the Selected Letters of J.J.G. Wilkinson' was...The treasure-trove of letters buried in your Swedenborg Society Archives. The 1,000 plus extant letters by Wilkinson paint a portrait of an incredibly complex man at the heart of literary London.

What are you working on now? I am finishing my dissertation, "The Science of Beauty", which examines the ways that Swedenborg contributed to 19th century environmental aesthetics. Another current project explores how native american artists and authors have worked within (and against) landscape painting traditions - an aesthetic implicitly tied to a contentious history of colonization and conflict.

How would you like Swedenborg to be remembered?As a major contributor to the Romantic movement; as someone who keenly felt the modern struggle between science and belief, and whose answers profoundly changed people's lives.