Jessikah Díaz

Jessikah Díaz is a lecturer of English with special expertise in transatlantic literature from 1650-1850. Her current book project, The Poetics of Exhaustion: Genre and the Mediation of Modern Energy, reads human and natural resource extraction in early industrial poetry. Transatlantic in scope, the project asks how thecommercial economies of Great Britain, the Caribbean, and Latin America functioned doubly as economies of emotion, at once depleting social life and supplying the means for its compensatory revival through literature. The book suggests that poetry aestheticized the imperial expansion of resources, while advancing moral questions about how and to what extent humans and nature should be utilized for productivity. Jessikah’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in New Literary History, Textual Practice, The Yale Review, and an edited collection called Romanticism and the Industrial Gaze. 

At Yale, Jessikah has taught courses on “Creatives and the Climate Crisis,” “Essays on Excess,” and “Exhaustion” in eighteenth-century literature. At the Yale Center for British Art, she has led workshops on industrial poetry, painting, and William Blake. During the summers, Jessikah has taught expository writing to First-Year Scholars at Yale, a program that offers FGLI students the chance to take coursework before they matriculate in the fall, and she has taught for the Warrior Scholar Project, a program for military veterans transitioning into university. Aside from teaching, Jessikah has organized events on “The Energy Humanities,” “The Future of British Studies,” and was an assistant editor at The Yale Review. 

Selected Publications

- Díaz, Jessikah. “Light Labor in the Eighteenth Century Georgic,” New Literary History, 56.4, Autumn 2025. https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2025.a988546.

- Díaz, Jessikah and Daniel Swain. “On Poetry and The Crowd: Lyric and Locodescription,” Textual Practice, Autumn 2025. https://doi.org/10.1080/0950236X.2025.2551333

Courses

- ENGL 1014: Essays on Excess: An expository writing course asking how we might accommodate the excesses of beauty and luxury in a materially finite world. 

- ENGL 1014: Creatives & the Climate Crisis: A composition course exploring how art and literature uniquely communicate the climate crisis. 

- ENGL 1015: The Aesthetics of Exhaustion: A literary seminar on human and natural resource extraction in eighteenth-century poetry and painting. 

- ENGL 1014: On Being Trendy: A composition course analyzing contemporary American aesthetics through political economy.

updated July 2026