Jordan Lovejoy is an American Council of Learned Societies Emerging Voices Fellow, Southern Futures Assistant Director, and Visiting Instructor of American Studies and Folklore at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She holds a PhD in English with an interdisciplinary specialization in folklore from The Ohio State University.

Lovejoy is interested in environmental folklife, engaged ethnography, and literature and artistic expression of Appalachia and the American South. Her work explores literary and vernacular forms of environmental storytelling, flood narratives, strategies for climate change communication, and environmental justice action and advocacy work. She is currently working on a project that examines what flood stories in Appalachia reveal about how people negotiate belief in relation to climate change, activism, and social and environmental justice.

Jordan Lovejoy has also worked with several community-focused programs and projects like the Liberal Arts Engagement Hub at the University of Minnesota, the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation’s Central Appalachia Living Traditions Program, the Ohio Field Schools project at Ohio State’s Center for Folklore Studies, and with the Wyoming East High School theater program in Wyoming County, West Virginia. She currently works with the Center for the Study of the American South at UNC-Chapel Hill.

The goal of her work is to amplify the diverse perspectives and creative activism of people who are imagining and building livability in their places despite intersecting crises.