Environmental Humanities Seminar with Jason Molesky

Jason de Lara Molesky is Assistant Professor of English at Saint Louis University (beginning in 2024), with specialties in modern and contemporary American literature. He holds an MFA from the University of Mississippi and a PhD from Princeton University. His book project, Company Town Archipelago: Culture, Environment, and American Corporate Empire, examines the daring archive of art and activism that has emerged from communities governed by US corporations. Drawing on his personal and familial experiences in the extraction zones of central Appalachia and the Sonoran borderlands, the project spotlights how contemporary writers and artists in a range of mediums often look to the complex legacies of company towns to animate possibilities of dissent and hope from deep within the Anthropocene. Jason is co-editor of Cli-Fi and Class: Socioeconomic Justice in American Climate Fiction (University of Virginia Press, 2024) and Teaching Energy Humanities (MLA Press, in progress). His essays have appeared in Modern Fiction Studies, American Literature, and The Georgia Review. He has been a resident artist at the Blue Mountain Center and a maintenance assistant in an underground coal mine. At the Mahindra Center, he will engage with artworks from US banana, petroleum, and rubber towns in the Global South. His writing and photography can be found at jasonmolesky.com. Hannah Waits is a lecturer in History and Literature at Harvard University and interdisciplinary historian specializing in politics, race, sex, and religion in the 20th- and 21st-century United States.