Jessica Saxby

Jessica Saxby has been at the American University of Paris since 2025 where she teaches an EN1010 class entitled “Environmental Histories and Ecological Perspectives in Art and Literature”. She holds a PhD in Cultural Studies from Goldsmiths, University of London.

Working at the intersection of cultural enquiry and art history, she is interested in decolonial ecologies, botanical and agricultural histories, and questions of technology, cultural memory and transmission in these contexts.

Her thesis, entitled Ballast Flora, Plants and the Politics of Colonial Memory in France examines the erasure of colonial histories in France, and explores how this not only occludes the colonial roots of environmental destruction, but naturalises and perpetuates continuing extractive modes of inhabiting the earth. It draws on the artwork Seeds of Change by artist Maria Thereza Alves, looking at the possibilities afforded by interdisciplinary artistic practices for historical enquiry that might destabilise cultures of erasure by reconnecting histories of imperialism, colonial science and the transformation of environments.

From 2020-2024 her doctoral research was supported by a four-year fellowship from the Consortium for the Arts and Humanities awarded by the UK Research Institute (UKRI).

From 2024-2025 she was Research Assistant to Professor Françoise Vergès as part of the project “Imagining the Post-Museum” for the Banister Fletcher Global Fellowship in Urban Studies.

She has taught Art, Politics and English at universities in France and the UK including Goldsmiths; University of London Institute in Paris; Université Paris 10 Nanterre and Université Paris 1 Sorbonne.