M.A. with distinction, English, Georgetown University, 2018
- Thesis Title: "Feeling Waste: Material Sensations in the Eighteenth Century"

B.A., English, Theater, and Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies, Oberlin College, 2012

Jacob Myers (he/they) researches global Anglophone literature of the long eighteenth century and the history of the life sciences, medicine, and public health. He holds additional graduate certificates in One Health (Perelman School of Medicine), Cinema & Media Studies, and Teaching. His work bridges the medical and environmental humanities, and he pursues projects on colonial biopolitics, plantation logics, and their legacies in film and media. He has received funding from the Science History Institute, McNeil Center for Early American Studies, Wolf Humanities Center, Huntington Library, Library Company of Philadelphia, Winterthur Museum, Fulbright Program, and UN Women. His peer-reviewed articles appear in Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpetation, Camera Obscura, and Early American Literature.

His dissertation, “Noxious Life: Figuring Vermin in the Natural Histories of the Anglophone Caribbean,” explores how colonizers narrativized island fauna as hazards to the plantocracy before emancipation and how free and enslaved Africans proposed alternative material and cosmological approaches to these animals. He analyzes narrative engagements with unruly animals – rats, snakes, insects, vultures, monkeys – across the archive, bringing together literature, scientific texts, and the vernacular tradition to track how animals were turned into so-called "vermin." In doing so, he contends that focusing on these creatures at the archive's margins can unearth the violent formations and failures of colonial life. "Noxious Life" argues that human enmeshments with disruptive "vermin" were paradoxically essential to the eighteenth-century formations of literature and science, two fields entwined by their reliance on Afro-Caribbean animal knowledge. 

Jacob's service includes working as the McNeil Center's 2024-25 Brown Bag 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. Along with teaching courses in English and Cinema & Media Studies, he has taught in the Health & Societies and the Pre-First Year Writing programs. He has provided HTR model training support for the digital project, 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 coming to Penn, Jacob performed curatorial research for the U.S. State Department's Diplomatic Reception Rooms and the Paley Center for Media, and he taught literature and film/media studies at Macao Polytechnic University and Beijing Normal-Hong Kong Baptist Univeristy. He also organized the 2018 Georgetown University interdisciplinary conference, New Biopolitics.