Jacob Myers is a literary critic and historian of science. His research explores human-animal relationships from the eighteenth century to the present. He examines people's connections to non-human animals across time to illuminate the importance of interspecies connection in global literary and scientific production. A Fulbright scholar, he has received fellowships from the Science History Institute, McNeil Center for Early American Studies, Wolf Humanities Center, Huntington Library, Library Company of Philadelphia, Winterthur Museum, and UN Women. His peer-reviewed articles appear or are forthcoming in Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpetation, Camera Obscura, Early American Literature, and Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture. 

His dissertation, “Noxious Life: Figuring Vermin in the Natural Histories of the Anglophone Caribbean,” tracks colonial narratives about non-domesticated animals to analyze how they were defined as so-called "vermin." His project follows these narratives across literature, scientific texts, and folklore to reveal animals' role in the emergence of modern environmental health. "Noxious Life" argues vermin narratives capture animals' paradoxical ability to generate harm and health between people, an ability that defines today's theories about the human body and social order. His first article from this project, "Keeping the Rat-Book: Marly and Visceral Histories of Jamaican Agriculture," won the 2026 Srinivas Aravamudan Prize and received honorable mentions for the 2026 James L. Clifford Prize and the 2025 Richard Beale Davis Prize.

At Penn, Jacob completed additional graduate certificates in One Health (Perelman School of Medicine), Cinema & Media Studies, and Teaching. His service has included working as the McNeil Center's 2024-25 works-in-progress series coordinator, a Wolf Humanities Center's 2025 Keywords symposium organizer, the Gender and Sexuality (Gen/Sex) Working Group's 2019-21 coordinator, and the Graduate English Assembly's 2019-20 funding librarian. He was also Career Services' 2021-22 PhD Professionalism Fellow where he managed the PhD Career Exploration Fellowship program. He has provided HTR model training support for The Revolutionary City: A Portal to the Nation's Founding, where he also wrote collections essays on race and slavery. He has co-organized numerous public humanities events in Philadelphia, including at the Annenberg Center, Rotunda, and Lightbox Film Center. Before starting his PhD, Jacob performed curatorial research for the U.S. State Department's Diplomatic Reception Rooms and the Paley Center for Media. He also organized the 2018 Georgetown University interdisciplinary conference, New Biopolitics. He received his M.A. from Georgetown University and his B.A. from Oberlin College.