Jayson Maurice Porter

Jayson Maurice Porter is a Post-Doctoral Associate in the Department of History at the University of Maryland. His research focuses on environmental histories of Mexico, the African Diaspora, food systems, agrochemicals, and environmental justice. He is currently completing a book manuscript with Duke University Press on the environmental history of the African Diaspora, violence, and environmental change in Guerrero, Mexico, centered on oilseed crops like cotton, sesame, and coconuts.

His teaching specialties include environmental justice history, science and technology studies of race and resistance, and Afro-Indigenous ecologies in Latin America. He teaches courses such as HIST 108 (First-Year Writing Seminar on Afro-Indigenous Environmental History in the Americas) and HIST 338 (Environmental Justice History of Agrochemicals, 1863–1962).

Jayson serves as a Black and Indigenous Climate Faculty Fellow in the Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; a board member of Rutgers University’s Black Ecologies Lab; and co-designer of the Chicago Teachers Union’s Environmental Justice Freedom School. He contributes to journals like Environmental Humanities and Plant Perspectives, and his writing appears in The Washington Post and Distillations Magazine.