Jenna Gersie is a PhD candidate in English specializing in American literature and the environmental humanities. In her dissertation, Jenna employs material ecocriticism to read the matter of the log cabin in American literature from 1839 to 1935, illuminating the log cabin’s role in histories of settlement, slavery, assimilation, and resistance. Though the log cabin as dwelling space held different meanings of “home” for different people, a close study of human relationships to matter, nonhuman kin, place, and each other within the space of the log cabin reveals possibilities for strengthened relationships in our present time of anthropogenic climate change, species extinction, and global environmental injustices.
Jenna has a BA in environmental studies from Skidmore College and an MS in environmental studies from Green Mountain College. She has participated in the Wildbranch Writing Workshop, the Bread Loaf Orion Environmental Writers’ Conference, and the Environmental Literature Institute, and she completed a fiction writing residency at the Vermont Studio Center. Her short fiction has recently been published in About Place Journal and The Fourth River, and her article, "Returning Home: Reinhabiting a Life-Place in Hermann Hesse’s Peter Camenzind and Knulp," was published in ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment. Jenna holds graduate certificates in college teaching, digital humanities, and Native American and Indigenous studies. She is a 2022-2023 fellow through the Consortium of Doctoral Studies in Literature and Culture, managing editor of the environmental literary magazine The Hopper, and mother to Willa.