Jamie L Jones

Jamie L. Jones is an Associate Professor in English and a Conrad Humanities Scholar at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She researches the cultural dimensions and historical origins of energy transition, infrastructure, logistics, and climate change.

Jones’s first book, Rendered Obsolete: Energy Culture and the Afterlife of U.S. Whaling (UNC Press 2023) 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. She chronicled the culture of the U.S. whaling industry from its peak production through its obsolescence in order to address the question:  “Where do industries go when they die?” Rendered Obsolete was shortlisted for the 2024 Modern Language Association (MLA) Prize for a First Book, and given Honorable Mention for the 2025 Ecocritical Book Award by the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (ASLE).

She is now at work on two new projects:  1) a cultural history of nineteenth-century United States energy booms, focusing on the midcentury petroleum industry in Pennsylvania and 2) a cultural history of logistics, shipping, and climate change in the Strait of Gibraltar.

Jones’s research has been published in Limn, The Dial, American Art, Configurations, Common-place and elsewhere. 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 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 several podcasts. As part of her public humanities practice, Jones has served as a guest curator at the Tangier American Legation Museum in Morocco, and has consulted on environmental humanities and maritime culture at other museums in the United States.

Jamie Jones teaches courses on 19^th-century U.S. literature, the environmental humanities, and environmental writing.  She has won several awards for her teaching at Harvard University, the University of Michigan, and at the University of Illinois. She earned her Ph.D. in American Studies at Harvard University. 

Jones is co-director of the Climate | Change Research Initiative at the Center for Advanced Study at the University of Illinois.

She is on leave for the 2025-26 academic year.