Jacob Myers

Jacob Myers is a postdoctoral fellow in Department Artifacts, Action, Knowledge. His research focuses on global Anglophone literature, environmental science, medicine, and public health in the long eighteenth century. At the MPIWG, he is a member of the Reclaiming Turtles All the Way Down (TAWD) Working Group. For the 2026–2027 academic year, he is jointly appointed as a postdoctoral fellow at the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.

He is currently at work on his book project, “Noxious Life: Figuring Vermin and Environmental Health in the Early Caribbean.” His first article from this project, “Keeping the Rat-Book: Marly and the Visceral Histories of Jamaican Agriculture” published in the journal Early American Literature, won the 2026 Srinivas Aravamudan Prize and received honorable mentions for the 2026 James L. Clifford Prize and 2025 Richard Beale Davis Prize. His other peer-reviewed publications appear or are forthcoming in Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, Camera Obscura, and Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture. His public-facing scholarship can also be seen in digital humanities projects like “The Revolutionary City.”

In 2025 Jacob received his PhD in English with certificates in One Health and Cinema & Media Studies from the University of Pennsylvania where his dissertation won the Diane Hunter Prize. A former Fulbright scholar and UN Women fellow, he has held long-term fellowships at the Science History Institute, McNeil Center for Early American Studies, and Wolf Humanities Center. Before coming to the MPIWG, he was a visiting assistant professor at Franklin & Marshall College.