Dr J.E. Telesca (Jennifer)

Jennifer E. Telesca is Associate Professor of Environmental Governance in the Department of Geography, Planning, and Environment at the Nijmegen School of Management, Radboud University, the Netherlands. Her work takes a critical approach to ocean studies, spanning the interests of environmental diplomacy, ethnographies of international law in society, the human–animal relationship, political economy, the politics of extinction, and science and technology in policymaking. She conducts fieldwork at the United Nations and in treaty bodies, diplomatic missions, and other sites scaled supranationally.

Red Gold: The Managed Extinction of the Giant Bluefin Tuna (University of Minnesota Press, 2020) is Telesca’s first single-authored book. Its on-the-ground, first-person research has shown just how damned the lives of fishes are in the very world entrusted to care for them in ocean governance. Her second book on hydrothermal vents, tentatively titled The Midnight Zone, invites readers to honor creatures in all their mysterious and seemingly impossible forms at sites in the deep dark sea—open to regulatory oversight—where scientists believe life on Earth began.

Telesca is trained to cross disciplines. By meandering past the silos in academic fields, she incites fresh thinking through unexpected scholarly alliance. This mode of engagement was honed in her pursuit of a PhD in Media, Culture, and Communication from New York University, where she earned a Distinguished Dissertation Award. She also holds double MAs, one in Law and Society from New York University and the other in Anthropology from the University of Connecticut—Storrs. At the latter, she earned a Graduate Certificate in Women’s Studies. Prior to graduate school, she received a BA with Departmental Honors in History from the University of Richmond, Virginia.

More information about her research, interests, and areas of expertise can be found on her website at www.jentelesca.com.