JAYME COLLINS, Ph.D.

Jayme Collins is a scholar, writer, and audio producer. She studies poetry, land use, climate change, and archives. She tells stories about communities and cultures navigating environmental change.

Jayme is currently the Public Humanities Teaching Fellow at Northwestern’s Kaplan Institute for the Humanities. She joined Northwestern from Princeton, where she was a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the High Meadows Environmental Institute and a project leader at Blue Lab. She has a PhD in English Literature from Northwestern University. She writes and produces an audio documentary series called Archival Ecologies.

ABOUT

WRITING

Book Project: “Composing in the Field”
Academic
Public and Catalogue
Reviews

AUDIO

Archival Ecologies

TEACHING

Princeton
Northwestern

EVENTS

Pop-up Story Patch
Ephemera Institute

EXPERIMENTS

Coracle
Tinkering

Things I see

Coracle: A Boat

While writing about a press named Coracle in the depths of a pandemic winter in Chicago, I suggested to Harris Feinsod that we try our hand at building one of these small, woven boats, and he agreed. We sourced willow, we found archival documentation of the process, we learned some rudimentary basket-weaving, we ordered calico, we waterproofed with tar paint, and then we paddled it down the Chicago river with some friends.

Video by Harris Feinsod

Photo by Harris Feinsod

Jayme Collins and Harris Feinsod with the Coracle. Photo by Emily Licht

Jayme Collins, Chicago River, Photo by Harris Feinsod