ABOUT

Jessica Landau is an Assistant Instructional Professor in the Committee on Environment, Geography, and Urbanization (CEGU) in the Social Sciences Division at the University of Chicago. She has a PhD in Art History with a minor in American Indian and Indigenous Studies from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. 

 

Her research considers images of North American megafauna, depictions of hunting and wilderness, and the history of natural history from the 19th and 20th centuries in order to understand the ways in which problematic settler colonial and masculinist tropes from these periods are still present in contemporary conservation discourse. Her methodology, which draws from the Environmental Humanities and Indigenous Critical Theory, understands representations of animals and places as once living creatures and physical landscapes - incorporating ecological knowledges of species and habitats into her analyses.

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In addition to her scholarly expertise, her teaching interests include advancing student learning through object and place based engagements. Her courses regularly incorporate experiential learning, practice based assessments, and community collaborations. 

 

She has taught at the University of Pittsburgh, National Louis University, and Eastern Illinois University. In 2019-2020 she was a Mellon/IPRH Pre-Doctoral Fellow in the Environmental Humanities at the University of Illinois. Now a scholar of museum studies, Landau has worked at several museums across the US, including: an Assistant Curator at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, PA, as the Executive Director of the Midwest Museum of Natural History in Sycamore, IL and as an Associate Curator of the Brinton Museum in Big Horn, WY