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Jane Robbins Mize

Assistant Professor

Contact

Bio

Education: PhD, 2023, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia; MA, 2021, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia; BA, 2015, University of Texas at Austin. Publications: Environmental Humanities, American Literary Realism, Hurston in Context (Cambridge UP, forthcoming). Awards: Diane Hunter Dissertation Prize, University of Pennsylvania; 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 the environment. Grounded in the environmental humanities and Native American and Indigenous Studies, my work focuses on the colonization and industrialization of North America, human-environment relations, and the carceral state. My current book project, "Water Works: Experimental Encounters with Settler Industrialization," examines case studies including the Los Angeles Aqueduct, the Central and South Florida Flood Control Project, the James Bay Project, and the Hoover Dam to reveal how writers retheorize human-water relations at sites of large-scale industrial transformation. 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 will introduce students to modern and contemporary literature by thinking through and against the canon. We will read across genres and traditions while discussing how culture, identity, and power relations impact the production and reception of literature in twentieth- and twenty-first-century America. Through readings such as Nella Larsen¿s Passing (1929) and N. Scott Momaday¿s House Made of Dawn (1968), we will analyze texts that unsettle hegemonic aesthetics and amplify marginalized voices. As such, students can expect to develop as critical thinkers, close readers, writers, and researchers.

Class Number

2277

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

1546

Credits

3

Description

In this course, we will examine how a variety of media¿from bestselling books to experimental films¿have represented and contributed to environmental justice movements. From Silent Spring to Standing Rock, we will engage with texts and films that use subversive storytelling to resist environmental degradation and confront the climate crisis. Our syllabus will focus on Black- and Brown-led movements in North America while also interrogating the meaning and scope of environmental justice worldwide. Throughout the semester, students will also have the opportunity to create small- and large-scale publications that communicate with and about environmental justice movements¿from zines to Tik Toks to protest banners. Ultimately, through our readings, screenings, discussions, and assignments, we will think through the social, ethical, and political implications of making media about the environmental crisis.

Class Number

2278

Credits

3

Description

How can critical and creative work influence human¿water relations? As the threat of droughts, floods, and severe storms intensifies, scholars, artists, and activists have turned their attention to bodies of water. In this course, students will explore the growing field of the 'blue humanities' while examining narratives of water crisis and resistance across media. We will ask questions such as: How do Western understandings of water as a ¿natural resource¿ lead to environmental and epistemological crises? How does storytelling contribute to resistance movements and advocate for the rights of water? What do the blue humanities contribute to the broader discipline of Environmental Studies, and how might the field intervene in scientific and political discourses? Course materials will foreground Black, Brown, and Indigenous voices and will include literature such as Linda Hogan's Solar Storms, films such as Julie Dash¿s Daughters of the Dust, and recent scholarship. Students will have the opportunity to practice experiential learning through site visits and creative assignments.

Class Number

2279

Credits

3