PhD in History, Northwestern, 2022

Voss Postdoctoral Associate in Environment and Society, Brown University, 2022-2024
Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow in History, University of Maryland, College Park, 2023-2025
Assistant Professor of History, University of Maryland, College Park, 2025 to the present

Jayson Maurice Porter was born in Maryland like his great-grandmother Winona Spencer Lee (1909-2012), who worked family farm land on the Eastern Shore until the early 2000s. He is an environmental writer and historian who researches environmental histories of Mexico, the African Diaspora, food systems, agrochemicals, and environmental justice and injustice. You can find his writing in The Washington Post, Environmental Humanities, Distillations Magazine, Environment and Society, and more. He is currently working on a book manuscript with Duke University Press on the environmental history of the African Diaspora, violence, and environmental change in Guerrero, Mexico through oilseeds crops, such as cotton, sesame, and coconuts.

As an environmental educator, Jayson’s teaching specialties extend to environmental justice history, science and technologies studies of race and resistance, and Afro-Indigenous ecologies in Latin America and the tropics more broadly. He is an editorial board member of the North American Congress for Latin America (NACLA) and Plant Perspectives: An Interdisciplinary Journal. He also serves as a Black and Indigenous Climate Faculty Fellow in the Indigenous Futures Lab of the Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; is a board member of Rutgers University’s Black Ecologies Lab; and is a co-designer of the Chicago Teachers Union’s Environmental Justice Freedom School.