Rate My Professor Jessica White

Jessica White is an Associate Professor and Senior Lecturer in the School of Humanities, College of Creative Arts, Design and Humanities at Adelaide University. She is an award-winning author of fiction, creative nonfiction, and memoir. Her research expertise spans creative and critical writing, life writing studies, Australian literary studies, disability studies, climate fiction, and the environmental humanities. From 2016 to 2019, she was an Australia Research Council (ARC) Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) fellow at The University of Queensland, during which she oversaw the creation of the Writing Disability in Australia dataset in the AustLit database to highlight representations of disability in Australian literature.

Currently, White is Chief Investigator on the ARC Discovery Project "Finding Australia's Disabled Authors: Connection, Creativity, Community" (DP240103154). She served as a 2022-2023 Arts Leader for Creative Australia and is co-founder of Science Write Now, a journal of creative writing inspired by science. White has received funding and residencies from the ARC, Creative Australia, Arts Queensland, CreateSA, the Copyright Agency, the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Munich, and the IASH Environmental Humanities group at the University of Edinburgh. She holds the Sir Terry Pratchett Awards Scholarship (2024-2027). Her publications include the forthcoming Silence is my Habitat: Ecobiographical Essays (Upswell Publishing, 2025), the co-edited Life Writing in the Anthropocene (Routledge, 2021), and peer-reviewed articles such as "Moving between worlds: creativity, disability and storytelling" (Text, 2024), "From the miniature to the momentous: writing lives through ecobiography" (a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, 2020), and "'The proud & haughty Rocks': gender, botany and archipelagic travel writing in Scotland" (Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 2021). White supervises doctoral students in creative writing related to climate change and the Anthropocene and currently writes an ecobiography about Botanist Georgiana Molloy.