Lecturer
B.A. English and History, University of California Santa Barbara
M.A. English Language and Literature, University of Chicago
Ph.D. English Language and Literature, University of Chicago
Office: UW1-151
Phone: (773) 350-8364
Email: jatkinson@uwb.edu
Box 358530, 18115 Campus Way NE, Bothell, WA 98011-8246
Teaching
Both my teaching and research focus on the intersection between space, place and American literature. I teach a variety of environmental humanities courses that explore problems in ecocriticism (or environmental criticism), urban studies, utopian studies, and modern & postmodern literature.
While conventional approaches to ecocriticism tend to emphasize nature writing, my teaching expands on this terrain by examining environmental representation in sub/urban, domestic, agricultural and travel literature as well. This broadly inclusive approach allows my students to explore different forms of spatial imagination and different material environments—from forests and frontiers to inner cities, tenement buildings and the fantasy spaces of science fiction—as they relate to problems of class struggle, race and displacement, gender, memory, and literary form. Before moving to Washington I also taught environmental humanities and utopian literature at the University of Chicago.
Fiction and creative nonfiction remain the primary objects of inquiry in my teaching, but all of my courses stress the importance of interdisciplinary analysis and draw on a variety of texts, including works in environmental science, urban studies, critical theory, Marxist geography, film and the visual arts.
Before teaching at the college level I worked in Brazil as an inner-city youth instructor for the social justice organization ADESOL, a group that creates educational opportunities for adolescents struggling with poverty and violence. Watching these students develop their skills as writers gave me an extraordinary insight into the transformative potential of teaching, and the experience continues to shape my understanding of the ways writing and language-based education can help marginalized students become more empowered participants in a social and political culture that often excludes their voices.
Research/Scholarship
While my early research focused on nature-writing and environmental narrative, I have increasingly turned my attention to the literary geographies of everyday experience, production, and urban struggle. Most recently, I have been looking at the various social histories embedded in American garden writing, which include the modernization of agriculture and mechanization of labor, urban growth, the rise of environmentalism, and everyday acts of resistance to the legacy of industrialization. I am currently at work on a book that tracks the literary history of the garden as both a spatial symptom of the dominant mode of production and a zone of alternative experience within the structure of daily life. My project tracks this history from the 1850s to the present, exploring the works of writers like Willa Cather, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Jamaica Kincaid and John McPhee, as well as popular gardening publications and utopian writing. While established imaginaries of space tend to equate the meaning of gardens with the escapist and apolitical, I use this archive to reevaluate cultivation as a practice that intensifies and complicates some of the key contradictions of capitalist modernity—divisions between work and leisure, nature and culture, waste and value, and the private and common.