Jennifer James
Jennifer James
Associate Professor of English
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Jennifer James
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(202) 994-6630
Associate Professor of English
Jennifer James's research is focused on nineteenth century African American literature, Black ecocriticism, war, and Black cultural memory. She is the author of A Freedom Bought with Blood: African American War Literature, the Civil War-World War II and is also co-editing a new collection of essays on representations of African American military service. She has recently completed a new manuscript, Captive Ecologies: The Environmental Afterlives of Slavery, which considers the considers how the afterlife of enslavement in the form of racial capitalism has shaped the Black ecological imagination and Black ecological relation at the intersections of human and non-human worlds. She has also begun a third book, Black Jack: Andrew Jackson and African American Cultural Memory. That work will trace the lives of three generations of her ancestors enslaved by the president to examine Black cultural memory of Jackson and enslavement. She is part of an exploratory advisory group related to slavery at the Jackson Hermitage Plantation.
She also currently serves as the president of C19: The Society for Nineteenth Century Americanists and is on the editorial board of a new online, peer-reviewed ecocritical journal, Regeneration: Environment, Art, Culture and will co-edit a special issue called" 'i agree with the leaves: Diversifying the Arboreal Humanities." Beginning in January 2025, she will serve on the board of American Literature.
In addition, her previous work has appeared in a range of journals including American Literature, American Literary History, The African American Review, Feminist Studies and MELUS. Other essays have appeared in collections such as Environmental Criticism for the 21st Century, Feminist Disability Studies, Fighting Words and Images: Representing War Across the Disciplines, and Keywords in African American Studies.
A Freedom Bought with Blood: African American War Literature, the Civil War-World War II, the University of North Carolina Press, 2007. CHOICE Outstanding Academic title, 2008.
“‘Buried in Guano’: Race, Labor and Sustainability,” American Literary History 24. 1 (2012):115-42. Special Issue: Sustainability in America
“Martin Luther King, Vietnam, and the Black Prophetic Tradition,” in Writing War Across the Disciplines, eds. Stephan Jaeger, et. al. (University of Toronto Press, 2012): 165-184. Forthcoming.
“Ecomelancholia: Slavery, War, and Black Ecological Imaginings” in Environmental Criticism for the 21st Century, eds. Stephanie LeMenager, et. al. (Routledge University, 2011): 163-178.
“‘On such legs are left me’: Gwendolyn Brooks, WWII and the Politics of Rehabilitation,” Feminist Disability Studies, ed., Kim Hall (Indiana University Press, 2011): 136-158.
Co-editor, and “Introduction,” Special topic issue of MELUS, The Journal of The Multiethnic Literature Society of the U.S.: Race, Ethnicity, Disability and Literature 31.3 (Fall 2006).
“‘Civil’ War Wounds: William Wells Brown, Violence and The Origins of African American War Fiction,” The African American Review: 39.1-2(Summer/Fall 2004):39-54.
Ph.D., English, University of Maryland.
M.A., English, Syracuse.
A.B., English, The College of William and Mary in Virginia.