David Toomey
Professor and Co-Director, PWTC Program
Faculty Bio
David Toomey is Co-Director of the Professional Writing and Technical Communication Program. He teaches a variety of undergraduate courses as well as the graduate seminars The Bible as Literature and Darwin, Freud, Einstein & Literary Culture.
His most recent book is Kingdom of Play: What Ball-bouncing Octopuses, Belly-flopping Monkeys, and Mud-sliding Elephants Reveal about Life Itself (Scribner, 2024). Other books include Weird Life: the search for life that is very, very different from our own (Norton, 2013), The New Time Travelers: a journey to the frontiers of physics (Norton, 2007) and Stormchasers: the Hurricane Hunters and their Flight into Hurricane Janet (Norton, 2002).
Kingdom of Play was selected for Booklist’s Top 10 Sci-Tech Books for 2024. Weird Life was longlisted for the 2014 PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award, shortlisted for Physics World Book of the Year for 2013, and named an “Editor’s Choice” by the New York Times Sunday Book Review. The New Time Travelers was among ten nonfiction books named “new and notable” by Scientific American in 2007 and listed among the “Best Sci-Tech Books 2007” by Library Journal.
His books have been reviewed by The Atlantic, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Scientific American and the Times Literary Supplement, and have appeared in Spanish, German and Japanese translations.
Toomey holds a Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Virginia.
Research Areas
- Nonfiction Writing
- Professional Writing & Technical Communication