The judges describe The Sky of Our Manufacture as “a richly layered analysis of the atmosphere of toxicity beginning in nineteenth-century England and shadowing our own contemporary world" that is "elegantly written, admirably focused, and highly original."
Jesse Oak Taylor (English) has won the 2017 Ecocriticism Book Award from the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment for his book The Sky of Our Manufacture: The London Fog in British Fiction from Dickens to Woolf (University of Virginia Press, 2016).
The judges describe The Sky of Our Manufacture as “a richly layered analysis of the atmosphere of toxicity beginning in nineteenth-century England and shadowing our own contemporary world" that is "elegantly written, admirably focused, and highly original." They praise Jesse’s "grasp of environmental history [and] material and economic theory," which enable him to undertake "illuminating textual readings."
Jesse is co-organizer, with Jason Groves (Germanics), of the Simpson Center’s Anthropocene crossdisciplinary research cluster, which continues in 2017-2018. He also a member of the 2017-2018 Society of Scholars for his project Becoming Species: Literature, Science, and the Emergence of the Anthropocene.
Congratulations, Jesse!