Jane Robbins Mize

Education: PhD, 2023, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia; MA, 2021, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia; BA, 2015, University of Texas at Austin. Publications: Environmental Humanities, American Literary Realism, Resistance: A Journal of Radical Environmental Humanities (forthcoming); Hurston in Context (Cambridge UP, forthcoming). Awards: Water Scholar Award, Colorado State University; David D. Anderson Award for Outstanding Essay in Midwestern Literary Studies (Honorable Mention), Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature; Diane Hunter Dissertation Prize, University of Pennsylvania; Mellon Humanities + Urbanism + Design Research Award, University of Pennsylvania; Lois P. Rudnick Writing Residency, Taos, NM.

I am a writer, teacher, and scholar of 20th- and 21st-century North American literature and the environment. Grounded in the environmental humanities and Native American and Indigenous Studies, my work focuses on the colonization and industrialization of North America, human-environment relations, and the carceral state. My current book project, "Water Works: Experimental Narratives of Settler Industrialization," examines case studies including the Los Angeles Aqueduct, the Central and South Florida Flood Control Project, the James Bay Project, and the Hoover Dam to reveal how writers retheorize human-water relations at sites of large-scale industrial transformation. I am also a member of Products of Our Environment, a collective of incarcerated and non-incarcerated scholars, writers, and artists interested in the intersection of prison abolition and environmental justice.