Jessica Hurley
Jessica Hurley
Associate Chair
Associate Professor
Literature: Speculative fiction and sci-fi; environmental humanities; C20/21 multi-ethnic American literatures; Indigenous and postcolonial literatures; science and technology studies, gender and sexuality studies.
Jessica Hurley is associate professor of English and affiliate faculty in Native American and Indigenous Studies, Cultural Studies, and Women and Gender Studies at George Mason University, where she teaches classes and supervises research in science/speculative fiction, multi-ethnic American, Indigenous, and world literatures, environmental humanities, queer studies, and critical theory.
Broadly, Hurley works at the intersection of literary and cultural studies, science and technology studies, and the environmental humanities. Her first book, Infrastructures of Apocalypse: American Literature and the Nuclear Complex, was published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2020 and was awarded the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment book prize, as well as being a finalist for the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present book prize. It argues that American literature has responded to the atom bomb not only as an unthinkable paradox or a future threat but also as a new set of apocalyptic infrastructures that have determined the flow of resources and risks across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The book delineates a new literary history of post-1945 America, expanding the archive of nuclear literature to include subaltern authors who have written against the infrastructural violence of the nuclear complex, from James Baldwin’s critique of the racialized urban spaces of civil defense to Leslie Marmon Silko’s analysis of nuclear waste as a colonial weapon. In so doing, it also offers a new theorization of apocalypse as a lived experience that enables a radical political imagination.
In her current book project, Nuclear Decolonizations, Hurley extends her work on cultural struggles around nuclearization in the U.S. to the transnational scale. This project analyzes the global manifestations of the U.S. nuclear complex – from power plants to uranium mines to testing sites – as contact zones between American nuclearism and Indigenous communities, revealing a complex and multidirectional relationship in which the U.S. is reshaped by its nuclear experiences abroad even as sites in South Asia, South Africa, Oceania, and Native North America are transformed by their contact with American nuclear technologies. Nuclear Decolonizations shows how nuclearization has impacted the decolonization imaginary in four key sites and how writers and activists in the Global South have both represented the imperial violence of the nuclear complex and used fiction, poetry, film, and performance to theorize alternatives to it.
Hurley’s work has appeared in American Quarterly, Apocalyptica, College Literature, symplokē, Mediations, Comparative Literature Studies, Commonwealth Essays and Studies, American Literature, Extrapolation, Frame, The Faulkner Journal, and the edited collections The Silence of Fallout: Nuclear Criticism in a Post-Cold War World and Toxic Immanence: Decolonizing Nuclear Futures and Legacies, among others, and been recognized by the Annette Kolodny Prize, the Don D. Walker Prize in Western Literature, the 1921 Prize in American Literature (honorable mention), and the Jim Hinkle Memorial Prize. She has also co-edited special issues on the topics of Apocalypse (ASAP/Journal, 2018) and The Infrastructure of Emergency (joint special issue of American Literature and Resilience, 2021), and is a member of the editorial board of American Literature. In 2021-22 she was a fellow at the National Humanities Center.
Selected Publications
“Nuclear Settler Colonialism at Sea, or, How to Civilize an Ocean.” American Quarterly 74.4 (December 2022), 969-995.
“Apartheid’s Nuclear Worldmaking.” Regeneration 2.3 (April 2026), 1-20.
“The Pikinni Ghost: Nuclear Hauntings and Spectral Decolonizations in the Pacific.” Apocalyptica 2.1 (January 2024), 85-106.
“Empire, Infrastructural Violence, and the Speculative Turn.” College Literature 50.2-3 (Summer 2023), 383-409.
Impossible Futures: Fictions of Risk in the Longue Durée. American Literature 89:4 (2017).
Complicity, for the Time Being: Nuclear Entanglements from Atoms for Peace to Fukushima. Comparative Literature Studies 56:4 (Fall 2019).
Expanded Publication List
Grants and Fellowships
2025: George Mason University Center for Humanities Research Summer Research Funding Award (for Nuclear Decolonizations)
2023: Stearns Center/Anti-Racism and Inclusive Excellence (ARIE) Grant for ENGH 206: Literature in the Creation of Just Societies Course Development (with Keith Clark and Parker O’Connor)
2021-22: Ruth W. and A. Morris Williams, Jr. Fellowship, National Humanities Center (for Nuclear Decolonizations)
2021: George Mason University Faculty Research Development Award
2018: Inclusive Pedagogy Project Award, University of Chicago (for “Universal Access in the Humanities Core”)
2017: First Book Institute Fellowship, Center for American Literary Studies at Pennsylvania State University (for Infrastructures of Apocalypse)
2014-15: Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship
Courses Taught
ENGH 451: Science Fiction
ENGH 458: Topics in Literary Research
ENGH 308 Theory and Inquiry: Toxic Humanities
ENGH 202 Texts and Contexts
ENGH 206: Science Fiction and Social Justice
ENGH 418: Cultural Constructions of Sexualities
ENGH 400: Honors Seminar in Black and Indigenous Futurisms
CULT 860: Space, Place, Environmental Justice
Education
Ph.D.: University of Pennsylvania, English, 2015. Certificate in College and University Teaching.
M.A.: University of Sussex, Twentieth Century Literature, 2007.
B.A. (Hons.), First Class: University of Oxford, English Literature and Language, 2004.
In the Media
2025 “Pamela Zoline’s ‘The Heat Death of the Universe.’” “Faculty Favorites” feature in Edge Effects magazine (Fall).
2025 “Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner’s Anointed.” “Faculty Favorites” feature in Edge Effects magazine (Spring).
2022: Darts and Letters podcast interview with Gordon Katic about nuclear cultures, "Mutually Assured Dysfunction."
2022: Infrastructures of Apocalypse quoted in Nino Mcquown, “White Futurism No Longer Holds Center Stage in HBO’s Station Eleven,” Electric Literature
2021: New Books Network podcast interview with Christian Long about Infrastructures of Apocalypse
2021: Edge Effects podcast interview with April Anson about Infrastructures of Apocalypse