Samuel Jacob is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Virginia. His research and teaching focuses on nineteenth-century American literature and culture, as well as the environmental humanities. He is particularly interested in intersections between American and Russian literatures, spaces, and people, and his dissertation project, Nearer Neighbors Than We Imagined: Nineteenth-Century American Literature’s Russian Imaginary and the Geography of Empire, examines how American literary nationalisms of the nineteenth century formed alongside the period's little-studied imaginative and literal entanglements with Russia. His work on Russian American literary, cultural, and environmental exchange has appeared both at academic conferences and in peer-reviewed publications, including most recently an article titled “Rerouting Russian America: Decontinentalized Alaska, Archipelagic Poetics, and Speaking Glaciers" published in Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment (ISLE).