Jess Holler

Jess Holler is a Ph.D. student in English Literature at Penn, and a MA student in Folk Studies, Public Sector-track, at Western Kentucky University. Her work combines archival research on the history and print culture of sustainable agriculture and grassroots environmental activism in the U.S., 1930s-1960s, with activist cultural documentation and applied, community folklore practice bridging contemporary non-profit work in environment, food justice and sustainable agriculture with local history. She is deeply invested in community-based public folklore and public history programming. Jess is currently conducting fieldwork on the role of personal experience narrative documentation in non-profit food access outreach with the VeggieSNAPs program in Columbus, Ohio, and interning at the Ohio History Connection to help develop education, outreach, oral history and collections digitization projects related to the history of conservation, environmental education and organic farming in Ohio.