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Cristin Ellis, associate professor of English and co-director of the interdisciplinary major in environmental studies, serves as an expert on all things Thoreau throughout the documentary.

The film premieres March 30 and 31 on PBS stations, including .

"Thoreau is someone who deserves a big audience right now," Ellis said. "This is someone who wrote powerfully about issues such as environmental destruction, racial injustice, how consumerism makes us depressed and how the media fractures our attention and distracts us from what really matters in life."

Ellis is an international expert on Thoreau, said Caroline Wigginton, chair of the UM Department of English.

"We're delighted that our students have the opportunity to learn from and conduct research with such a renowned faculty member," Wigginton said.

Thoreau's reflections and observations are applicable today, said Erik Ewers, one of the film's directors.

"Every chapter of this three-hour film has moments that reflect the times we live in, in one way or another," Ewers said. "It cannot be avoided; the parallels of his time with ours are nothing short of remarkable."

Ellis concurs.

"He wrote about how to protect your attention as a way to protect your soul so that you can make sure that you are spending time with what is important to you and really thinking about what's valuable," the Ole Miss professor said.

"So, it feels fresh and relevant – his worry about attention and the difficulty of living a life of conscience and deliberateness when you are being pulled in a million directions."

The way the film was constructed is different than most historical biographies, Ewers said.

"We saw an opportunity to bring Thoreau to our present day, quite literally, allowing our interviewees to 'break the fourth wall,' and identify with the society we are all obligated to belong to, complete with all of its many problems," he said. "By allowing our viewers to experience Thoreau's chronological life while he is experiencing it, we get an opportunity to relate to both him, his development and growth as a person, and therefore experience Thoreau's discoveries and revelations as if we were there."

Thoreau, best known for his works "Walden" and "Civil Disobedience," became Ellis' area of expertise sort of by accident. Though she grew up in New England and even swam in Walden Pond, it wasn't until graduate school at Johns Hopkins University that she truly discovered the writer.

"That's where I really found what felt like a living, breathing person, someone I recognized, and that reached across history to me," she said. "I felt, 'Here is someone really wrestling with the issues of this day, the big questions of the human condition.'

"That's also why I think the documentary is getting made: so that people have that experience, too."

The documentary shows Thoreau as a product of his time, that he networked with other thinkers as part of a community.

"It will give us a portrait of someone who took such pleasure and found so much rewarding in just spending time out, observing nature, being in nature, feeling this vivid connection to the natural world," Ellis said.

Because she has published research, articles and book chapters about Thoreau, producers contacted Ellis about three years ago to gauge her interest in serving as an expert and consultant on the film.

Serving as a generalist on the gamut of Thoreau, she was interviewed on camera for more than an hour in an almost pop-quiz fashion. The production team provided no advance warning of question types.

"My job in the documentary is providing a more historical account and theoretical account of Thoreau's life and happenings," she said.

Ellis' passion for Thoreau is evident throughout the film, Ewers said.

"Cristie has such incredible insight into Thoreau the person, the writer, the philosopher, the thinker, as well as his legacy," he said. "Her enthusiasm and heartfelt emotion for this often-elusive character made her a perfect interviewee. She appears throughout the film on a regular basis and serves as an informative and emotional 'anchor' for us."

However, Ellis did provide herself with the comfort of a Thoreau quote cheat sheet, since she did not know what exactly was to be asked of her.

"I went in with a sheet of some of my favorite quotations, just to remind myself of the moments that sparkle for me," she said. "And if I can use them as lodestones, that this is my Thoreau and what speaks to me, and if I can get some of that across, then I've done my duty to what I understand to be what's valuable about Thoreau."

While Ellis served as a Thoreau teacher for the documentary, she also found herself as a student.

"Witnessing the directors think 'What are the best ways to translate this for a general audience today?' is so great because this helps me remember how to communicate with my students," she said. "It was so gratifying to see them (the directors) share my sense that so much of Thoreau feels very present day, very of the moment."

She is developing a new course on attention that will highlight Thoreau.

"I think it's so central to what Thoreau's interested in, and I think it is also so present on the mind of a lot of our students; that they are aware they're living in an economy that feeds on their attention, and that their attention is something they struggle with in college," she said. "And I hear more and more (that) students are eager to reclaim their attention."

The things that can be learned from Thoreau and this documentary are deserving of attention, Ellis said.

"If you are present in the moment, you will be able to have a much more joyful, rich experience than if you're always distracted and checking things off," she said.

"I just love that he's getting attention."

Top: Ole Miss English professor Cristin Ellis grew up in New England and swam in Walden Pond, where author, philosopher and naturalist Henry David Thoreau created his most influential works. Ellis provides context and commentary on the writer's life and work in 'Henry David Thoreau,' a new documentary by Ken Burns that premieres March 30-31 on PBS. Adobe Stock photo