Department of English

• Tuesday, April 22, 2025 - 12:00pm to 1:00pm

Fisher-Bennett Hall Graduate Student Lounge (room 330) and Zoom

On Tuesday, April 22, Jacob Myers will defend his dissertation "Noxious Life: Figuring Vermin in the Natural Histories of the Anglophone Caribbean." Jacob writes:

"This dissertation argues eighteenth-century Anglophone nature writers theorized unruly animal subjects as colonial antagonists. In the early Caribbean, so-called 'pests' formed their own networks – manifesting alternative human-animal-plant relations across the plantation’s borders – and thwarted attempts to impose epistemological and social order on the islands. Naturalists thus increasingly relied on the methods of Afro-Caribbeans who had a better grasp of the landscape. This expertise was necessarily tied to their survival and resistance to enslavement, and thus Afro-Caribbean knowledges also regularly frustrated planter efforts to render the environment productive, making them hostile to the development of colonial science. Bridging the temporal and geographical gaps between previous studies on pests, this dissertation suggests vermin narratives in the early Caribbean reveal how colonizers’ efforts to separate a cultivated plantation space from torrid ecologies were fractious. Through case studies on four pests – rats, insects, snakes, and vultures – this dissertation analyzes human-nonhuman enmeshments to chart the fraught ideological formation of racial distinctions, European theories of the body, and civilizational progress. Its central theoretical concept, 'noxious life,' underscores how island life’s ability to be poisonous and fecund disrupted the emergent colonial biopolitical regime."

The defense will be a hybrid event, held both in the FBH Grad Lounge (room 330) and on Zoom (please contact Jacob for the link). The private portion of the defense will take place from 10:30 to 12 pm, and the public portion of the defense will take place from 12 to 1 pm, to be followed by a celebratory reception.

We hope to see you there as we congratulate Jacob on this wonderful achievement!