Jacob Myers

Jacob Myers is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Pennsylvania. He specializes in global Anglophone literature of the long eighteenth century with particular interests in colonial biopolitics, plantation logics, and the intertwined history of the life sciences, medicine, and public health. His dissertation, “Noxious Life: Figuring Vermin in the Natural Histories of the British Caribbean,” charts how resident colonizers investigated animals to theorize the plantation space as beset by insurgent, toxic obstacles. “Noxious Life” takes up classic pest figures–rodents, insects, worms, birds–to investigate how both Britons and Afro-Caribbeans negotiated the environment, attending to how Afro-Caribbeans’ productive engagements with non-domesticated animals fell outside of colonial understanding. Reading across literature, scientific and medical texts, plantation documents, and the vernacular tradition, his project asserts the “verminification” of more-than-human life marks colonization’s epistemological foreclosures and provides counter-histories to them.

Myers’s articles appear or are forthcoming in Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, Camera Obscura, and Early American Literature. His work has been supported by the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, Huntington Library, Library Company of Philadelphia, Winterthur Museum, Wolf Humanities Forum, Fulbright Program, and UN Women. Before coming to Philadelphia, Jacob performed curatorial research for the U.S. Department of State’s Diplomatic Reception Rooms and the Paley Center for Media. He received his MA from Georgetown University and his BA from Oberlin College.