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. He is the recipient of
numerous fellowships and awards, including generous support from
the Fulbright Program, The Institute for Citizens and Scholars
(formerly the Woodrow Wilson Foundation), The Andrew W. Mellon
Foundation, and the Harrington Fellows Program. His articles can be
found or are forthcoming at Callaloo, Souls, and Atlantic Studies. 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. It argues that the blackness which
dawned in the oceanic encounter of Middle Passage constitutes not
social death, but ecological life. This black, which was first blue,
indexes a global species event, whose expressive legacy harbors an
ecological recalibration of human being on a blue planet.
Dr. Howard teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in African
American literary studies, black studies, and the environmental
humanities. His teaching surveys the literary, expressive, and
intellectual traditions of the African Diaspora as a crucial reserve of
environmental and ecological thought. Above all, and in deep
collaboration with his students, his courses aim to facilitate the
phenomenon of “black study.” That is, to attend, again and again, in
literature and more, to black death and life, to no smaller end than the
end of the antiblack world and the celebration and magnification of
black life on earth.
Dr. Howard earned an M.A. and PhD from Duke University and a B.A.
from the University of Pennsylvania.