Jessica Martell

Dr. Jessica Martell serves as Associate Professor in the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies at Appalachian State University, with additional affiliations as Affiliate Faculty at the Center for Appalachian Studies and Member of the Graduate School Faculty. She has been awarded the prestigious Fulbright-Queen's University Belfast Scholar in Irish Studies for 2025-2026.

Her research centers on the intersections of literature, food systems, environmental humanities, and film within modernist and postcolonial contexts. Specializing in British and Irish modernisms, she examines how industrial food production under empire shaped literary aesthetics while exploring contemporary ecological crises through cultural production. Her acclaimed monograph Farm to Form: Modernist Literature and Ecologies of Food in the British Empire (2020) reframes modernist studies through food politics, earning recognition in Modern Fiction Studies and the Times Literary Supplement for fundamentally altering ecocritical approaches to the period.

Recent publications demonstrate her transnational methodology, analyzing kudzu's cultural symbolism in American tropics, Vorticism's relevance to climate discourse, Irish historical narratives in apocalyptic fiction, and WWI food sovereignty movements. These works collectively bridge literary analysis with environmental history, agricultural studies, and postcolonial theory across British, Irish, and American contexts.

• Fulbright-Queen's University Belfast Scholar in Irish Studies (2025-2026)

Dr. Martell co-leads the Study Abroad program "Peacebuilding and the Arts in Ireland and Northern Ireland" and teaches interdisciplinary courses including Empire and Peacebuilding in Ireland, Borders and Walls, Screening the Postcolonial World, and Critical Perspectives on Food. Her Global Studies and Watauga Residential College instruction emphasizes experiential learning through international engagement and food systems analysis.