Dr. Jonathan Howard is an Assistant Professor of English and African American Studies at Yale University. His research and teaching broadly interrogate western ideas about race and nature, weighing their entangled contribution to the formation of a modern world in ecological peril while also exploring black expressive culture as an alternative site of ecological thought and practice.
Dr. Howard is an African American literary scholar whose research places the literary and intellectual traditions of the African Diaspora in conversation with the environmental humanities. His current book project, “Inhabitants of the Deep: The Blueness of Blackness,” illuminates the abiding relationship between blackness and the oceanic by undertaking a black ecocritical study of the trope of water in African Diaspora literature.
Dr. Howard teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in African American literary studies, black studies, and the environmental humanities. Dr. Howard currently teaches the first-year seminar, “Black Nature: African American Nature Writing.”