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Jane Robbins Mize

Assistant Professor

Contact

Bio

PhD, 2023, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia; MA, 2021, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia; BA, 2015, University of Texas at Austin. Publications: Environmental Humanities, Hurston in Context (Cambridge UP, forthcoming), American Literary Realism (forthcoming). Awards: Mellon Humanities + Urbanism + Design Research Award, University of Pennsylvania; Lois P. Rudnick Writing Residency, Taos, NM

Personal Statement

I am a writer, teacher, and scholar of twentieth-century North American literature and culture. My work examines the colonization and industrialization of North America and human relations to the environment. My current book project, "Waterworks: Experimental Encounters with Settler Industrialization," examines case studies including the Los Angeles Aqueduct, the Central and South Florida Flood Control Project, the Panama Canal, the James Bay Project, and the Hoover Dam to reveal how large-scale infrastructure has transformed human–water relations. A second project considers the entanglements of industrial agriculture and the carceral state from the early twentieth century to the present. I am also a member of Products of Our Environment, a working group of incarcerated and non-incarcerated scholars, writers, and artists interested in the intersection of prison abolition and environmental justice.

Courses

Title Department Catalog Term

Description

This course explores how the environment is imagined, represented, and engaged in Native American literature from the early twentieth century to the present. We will ask questions such as: How does Indigenous storytelling frame subjects including human-nonhuman relations, natural and urban spaces, and environmental law? What might Native American literature reveal about the tensions between Indigenous epistemologies of the environment and settler environmentalism? What is the connection between environmental justice and decolonization—and how does Indigenous literature, film, and art contribute to such movements? We will analyze texts within their unique environmental, historical, and cultural contexts—and we will also consider larger frameworks including settler colonialism, capitalist industrialization, and Indigenous sovereignty. Readings will include literature such as Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms (1994) and Tommy Pico’s Nature Poem (2017) as well as scholarship by Gerald Vizenor, Nick Estes, and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson.

Class Number

2351

Credits

3

Description

In her 2020 collection Postcolonial Love Poem, the Mojave poet Natalie Diaz writes, “I have never been true in America. America is my myth.” Since its founding, the United States has promoted a mythologized identity grounded in freedom and equality while expanding its projects of settler colonialism and imperialism. In this course, students will analyze literature that both reflects and resists U.S. myth-making from the early twentieth century to the present. As we examine both canonical and non-canonical texts, we will ask questions such as: How does literature contribute to the formation of American identity both at “home” and abroad? How do diverse cultures, ethnicities, and identities contribute to the production and reception of American literature? How might literature challenge cultural hegemony, settler colonialism, and American imperialism? Readings include novels by Leslie Marmon Silko and Julia Alvarez as well as poems by Natasha Trethewey, Ada Limón, and Joy Harjo.

Class Number

2356

Credits

3