Jamie L Jones

Jamie L. Jones is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She earned her Ph.D. in American Studies at Harvard University.  Her research explores the historic pivot in energy use in the nineteenth century, when whale oil and other organic energy sources gave way to fossil fuels.  Jones considers the way that U.S. literature, art, and popular culture represented that energy transition, and her research finds that those cultural representations in turn have shaped our perception of environmental change, our practices of energy extraction and consumption, and our imagination of the world’s oceans. Her current book project, Rendered Obsolete:  The Afterlife of U.S. Whaling in the Petroleum Age, chronicles the culture of the U.S. whaling industry from its peak production through its obsolescence in order to addresses the question:  “Where do industries go when they die?”

Jones’s work has been published in American Art, Configurations, and Common-place. Her research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Whiting Foundation, the John Carter Brown Library, and others. Jones has won several awards for her teaching at Harvard University, the University of Michigan, and the University of Illinois. 

Jones has also written for the Los Angeles Review of Books and The New York Times, and has been interviewed about her research on the BBC World News Service, and on the podcasts BackStory and Cellar Door.