Jessica Martell

Fulbright-Queen's University Belfast Scholar Award (Irish Literature)

Northern Ireland and the U.S. South share complicated and contested agricultural histories. Who owns and works the land, and who gets to enjoy and profit from the food it yields? In this project, Dr. Jessica Martell explores what historical plantations in Ulster and the South can teach us about how societies are segregated by global systems, how plantations still structure our habits of perceiving the world, and how we can overcome divisive thinking through intercultural exchange.

Martell is Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at Appalachian State University. She is the author of Farm to Form: Modernist Literature and Ecologies of Food in the British Empire (2020) and the co-editor of Modernism and Food Studies: Politics, Aesthetics, and the Avant Garde (2019). Her essays on literature, food, and the environment have appeared in many scholarly books and journals like Modernist Cultures and Gastronomica.

Martell lives in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina with some chickens, a huge garden, and her dog Turnip.