Jen Westerman
Jen is a Ph.D. candidate in English, Literature and the Environment emphasis, and she is currently working on her dissertation, “Landscapes of Labor: Work, Nature, and Environmental Justice in American Working-Class Novels of the Depression-Era.” Her project explores representations of the interrelated exploitation of human laborers and degradation of the natural world in working-class fiction from an environmental justice perspective.
She has an undergraduate degree in English from the College of William and Mary and a master’s degree in American Studies from Utah State University. Prior to beginning her Ph.D. program, she served as a Peace Corps volunteer in El Salvador (1997-1999) and worked for state parks, the National Park Service, and the US Forest Service from Maine to Arizona and many places in between. She enjoys spending time outdoors with her husband, Jim, daughter, Iris, and their three dogs.
Jennifer’s academic research interests include nineteenth- and twentieth-century American environmental justice and social justice literatures, the literature of travel and exploration, environmental literature of the Americas, creative non-fiction nature writing, and ecocritical theory. She has published in Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, Mississippi State Quarterly Review, Nineteenth-Century Prose, the Encyclopedia of the New American Nation, and Facts on File Companion to the American Novel and presented her work at several academic conferences. She served as assistant editor of the book review section of the journal Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment for two years. She was twice awarded the Graduate Student Association’s Outstanding Graduate Student Scholarship and received the Department of English’s James H. Macmillian Scholarship in Creative Nonfiction. Jen was the recipient of both the Department of English’s Scott Gordon Douglass Memorial Scholarship for Excellence in Teaching and The Excellence in Teaching Program’s Outstanding Graduate Teaching Assistant Award.
Please feel free to contact Jen at hughesj@unr.nevada.edu.