Jason’s research and teaching span all periods of American literature, with a focus on twentieth and twenty-first century narratives about fossil energy extraction. His interests include the modern metropolis, immigrant and ethnic literatures, proletarian fiction, disaster and environmental writing, critical race theory, and the relationship between affect, toxicity, and literary form.

Ph.D. University of Virginia. D. Vance Smith is a medievalist who grew up in Africa, learning isiNdebele along with English as a member of the Khumalo clan of the amaNdebele.  Attending an all-African high school in Kenya, he also spoke Kiswahili and early Sheng (the Kenyan street vernacular). Before graduate school, he wrote two ethnographies on groups of people living in what is now the South Sudan.

Anne Anlin Cheng is Professor of English, Director of American Studies, and affiliated faculty in the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies and the Committee on Film Studies. She is an interdisciplinary scholar who works at the intersection of aesthetics and politics, drawing from literary theory, critical race studies, film theory, feminist theory, and psychoanalysis.  She works primarily with twentieth-century American literature and visual culture with special focus on Asian American and African American literatures.