Keywords: Plant Studies - Animal Studies - Environmental Humanities
Affiliation: Assistant Professor of German Studies, University of Arizona
Joela Jacobs is Assistant Professor of German Studies at the University of Arizona and the founder of the Literary and Cultural Plant Studies Network (https://sites.arizona.edu/plants/). Her research focuses on 19th-21st century German literature and film, Animal Studies, Environmental Humanities, Jewish Studies, the History of Sexuality, and the History of Science.
Current books include the monograph Animal, Vegetal Marginal: The German Literary Grotesque from Panizza to Kafka (Indiana University Press, 2025), Plant Poetics: The Literary Forms and Functions of the Vegetal (Brill, 2025, co-edited with Isabel Kranz and Solvejg Nitzke), and Microbium: The Neglected Lives of Micro-Matter (punctum books, 2023, co-edited with Agnes Malinowska), in addition to several journal special issues (on the literary lives of plants, animal narratology, third-generation memory literature, and the author Oskar Panizza) as well as a forthcoming Metzler Kulturwissenschaftliches Handbuch on plants (co-edited with Isabel Kranz). She has published articles on topics as different as monstrosity, literary censorship, biopolitics, asexual ecologies, pollen, roses, plant exhibits, animal epistemology, zoopoetics, Nazi rabbit breeding, and German/Jewish/American graphic novels.
In the Environmental Humanities, she has written several pieces about environmental education initiatives for refugees and asylum seekers in Germany, showing how a specific cultural understanding of environmentalism is instrumentalized for "integration." In Plant Studies, she working widely on phytopoetics, the way plants shape literary writing and cultural currents, with a specific focus on vegetal eroticism and violence. When it comes to animals, she has published on the tradition of the canine narrator, from Berganza to Doge.