Jesse Oak Taylor is a professor at the University of Washington in Seattle where he also serves as Director of Undergraduate Studies in English and core faculty for the minor in Environmental Cultures and Values. He is the author of The Sky of Our Manufacture: The London Fog in British Fiction from Dickens to Woolf (2016), which won both the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) book award in ecocriticism and the Sonia Rudikoff prize for a first book in Victorian Studies from the Northeast Victorian Studies Association (NVSA). He is also co-editor (with Tobias Menely, UC-Davis) of Anthropocene Reading: Literary History in Geologic Times, (Penn State University Press, 2017), and co-organizer (with Jason Groves, UW Germanics) of a Simpson Center Interdisciplinary Research Cluster on the Anthropocene.

Taylor is a member of the Simpson Center Executive Board.