Jason Hertz is a literary and cultural studies Ph.D. student at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL). He works primarily with twentieth-century American literature, specializing in Native American autobiography.
During the summer of 2012 he worked for the National Forest Service, designing exhibits for the Hudson-Meng Bison Bonebed in the Oglala National Grassland. He researched paleoindian culture, explored local petroglyph sites, and attended local rodeos.
Following place-based research interests on the Great Plains, from South Dakota’s Black Hills down to Texas’s Llano Estacado, he presented on American Indian Movement activist Leonard Peltier's Prison Writings to the Western Literature Association and spoke on Chicana scholar Norma Cantú's memoir Canícula at the First Biennial Latina/o Literary Theory and Criticism Conference with the City University of New York. Later this spring (2013) he will give a paper to the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment on Peter Matthiessen's Snow Leopard, a book about Nepal’s Himalayas, but thoroughly topophilic.
An avid hiker, explorer, writer, researcher, and teacher, Jason finds that work moves him around, but wherever he is, he finds meaning staying placed.