Jess is an environmental historian of early modern Latin America and the Caribbean. Their dissertation examines the ecological aspects of Spanish imperialism in the 16th and 17th centuries, focusing specifically on the mule train transit industry that linked the Spanish territories of the Atlantic and Pacific worlds across the isthmus of Panamá. The project pushes us to consider the ways in which certain hallmarks of "modernity"–global networking, capitalistic enterprise, racial, gendered, and interspecies hierarchy–already took clear shape in the early modern period under an energy regime dependent on the laboring capacity of enslaved humans and domesticated non-humans.