Jacob Myers is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Pennsylvania. He specializes in global Anglophone literature of the long eighteenth century and the history of science, medicine, and public health. More specifically, he pursues projects on colonial biopolitics and plantation logics. He attends to how environmental actors shaped literary and scientific epistemologies across the British empire and how colonial actors encoded these shifts in print and visual media and the vernacular tradition. His dissertation explores how British colonizers and enslaved Africans understood non-domesticated animal life that challenged the operations and ideologies of the early Caribbean plantation system. His research has been supported by the Science History Institute, McNeil Center for Early American Studies, Winterthur Museum, Huntington Library, and Library Company of Philadelphia. His articles appear or are forthcoming in Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, Camera Obscura, and Early American Literature.
Jacob Myers
Wolf Humanities Center Doctoral Fellow
2024—2025 Forum on Keywords
Jacob Myers
Ph.D. Candidate, English
Noxious Life: Figuring Vermin in the Natural Histories of the British Caribbean
Noxious Life: Figuring Vermin in the Natural Histories of the British Caribbean analyzes how more-than-human life was categorized as vermin in the eighteenth-century Caribbean. Working across literature, scientific texts, and folklore, his project tracks how colonizers coded agricultural, medical, and psychic hazards as in need of management or extermination through a figurative language of animality and racialization. In each chapter, he follows a classic Caribbean pest – cane-rat, helminth, serpent – across the archive to unearth how engagements with so-called “pests” shaped racial slavery, plantation extraction, and colonial medicine and agriculture. His central concept, “noxious life,” elucidates how fugitive survival in the early Caribbean among large-scale violence and death was essential to defining – and pressuring – the colonial category of the human.