Jane Robbins Mize
(she/her/hers)
Dissertation Advisor(s): Nancy Bentley
"Waterworks: Settler Industrialization and Literary Experimentation in Twentieth-Century North America"
Assistant Professor of Liberal Arts, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
I completed my PhD in English at the University of Pennsylvania in August 2023. Grounded in Indigenous Studies and Black Studies, my research and teaching focus on the colonization and industrialization of North America and on human relations to the environment. My dissertation, titled "Waterworks: Settler Industrialization and Literary Experimentation in Twentieth-Century North America," examines case studies in the Mojave Desert, Florida Everglades, and elsewhere to reveal how writers responded to the large-scale industrialization of the continent's bodies of water.
For 2022–23, I was the Public Pedagogies Fellow for the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities, where I began collaborating on Products of Our Environment. In Spring 2022, I was a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at The College of New Jersey, where I taught an entry-level course on literature of the American Empire, a capstone research seminar on environmental literature, and masters seminars called "Literature and Theories of Water" and "Native American Literature and the Environment." I was also a member of Penn EnviroLab, a multidisciplinary workspace for researchers focused on environment-society relations, as well as a Graduate Fellow for Teaching Excellence at the Center for Teaching and Learning and president of the Graduate English Association.
Before coming to Penn, I was as an assistant editor at PublicAffairs Books, where I worked on books by historians and journalists. While living in Austin, Texas, I co-founded and edited Foxing Quarterly and, in Philadelphia, designed and letterpressed a chapbook series called The Swan. I grew up in Athens, Georgia, near the Oconee River, and received my BA in English and Latin from the University of Texas at Austin.