معرفی
Jesse Oak Taylor is a Professor in the English Department at the University of Washington, specializing in Victorian literature and environmental humanities. His research focuses on industrialization and empire in the nineteenth century and their relevance for tracing the emergence of the Anthropocene, with particular attention to how literary forms respond to environmental transformations.
- PhD in English, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2010
- MA in English, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2005
- BA in English, cum laude, Middlebury College, 2002
Taylor's research centers on the intersections of 19th-century British literature, climate change, and the Anthropocene, pioneering work in what he terms the Earth System Humanities. His award-winning book, The Sky of Our Manufacture: The London Fog in British Fiction from Dickens to Woolf, examines how aesthetics, especially the novel, reframed human perception to comprehend environments fundamentally altered by industrialization. He teaches courses on Victorian Britain and the British Empire, Darwin and evolutionary theory, and the environmental humanities, with recent offerings including ENGL 556 A: Cultural Studies (Winter 2025) and ENGL 265 A: Introduction to Environmental Humanities (Spring 2022).
His scholarly output demonstrates consistent innovation across multiple disciplines, with publications spanning from 2012 to 2022 that bridge literary criticism with climate science, evolutionary theory, and postcolonial studies. Taylor's work consistently explores how literary forms engage with environmental crisis, extinction, and the temporal dimensions of planetary change.
Taylor has received significant recognition for his scholarly contributions:
- English Department Distinguished Teaching Award (2024)
- Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) Book Award in Ecocriticism (2017)
- Northeast Victorian Studies Association (NVSA) Sonya Rudikoff Award for best first book (2016)
- American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) New Faculty Fellowship (2011-2013)
- Bruce Harkness Award, Joseph Conrad Society of America (2012)
As an academic leader, Taylor co-organizes the Simpson Center Interdisciplinary Research Cluster on the Anthropocene and serves as editor of the book series "Under the Sign of Nature: Explorations in Environmental Humanities" from University of Virginia Press. He has mentored numerous PhD students whose dissertations explore diverse topics including Victorian environmental thought, postcolonial ecocriticism, and contemporary climate fiction, demonstrating his commitment to building scholarly communities around environmental humanities.
