Contact

Jason M. Kelly, PhD FSA FRHistS FRSA

University Email: jaskelly@iu.edu
Personal Email: jason@jasonmkelly.com
Linkedin: jasonmkelly
Bluesky: @jasonmkelly.bsky.social
GITHUB: 6500jmk4
ORCID :0000-0002-5018-4974
Researchgate: jason_kelly2
GOOGLE SCHOLAR: Jason M. Kelly
FLICKR: jasonmkelly

About

Jason M. Kelly is founding Director of the IU Indianapolis Arts and Humanities Institute (IAHI) and Professor of History at Indiana University Indianapolis, where he holds affiliate appointments in Africana Studies and American Studies. An interdisciplinary historian of the early modern world, Kelly examines how social, cultural, environmental, institutional, technological, and material systems and processes interact and change over time. He is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London and the Royal Historical Society.

Kelly received his PhD from the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of The Society of Dilettanti: Archaeology and Identity in the British Enlightenment (Yale University Press and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2010), lead editor of Rivers of the Anthropocene (University of California Press, 2017), and co-editor of An Anthropocene Primer (2017). His research examines the interface between social life and the production and contestation of knowledge. It is grounded in archival research and visual and material culture, supplemented by methods from the digital humanities. His scholarship intervenes in longstanding debates in the histories of science, technology, and environment; the social sciences; art and visual culture; and gender and family.

His current monograph, Family, Environment, and Empire in the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic, examines the co-evolution of families and environments across the long eighteenth century. It places families at the center of environmental change, asking how household strategies, property, labor, and migration altered landscapes and how changing environmental conditions, in turn, reshaped family life. Empire provides both the geographical setting and the analytical framework, allowing the project to move from state policy and imperial institutions to local negotiations over land, labor, and resources. The project places these encounters within longer histories of environmental, social, and institutional change, showing how local decisions accumulated across generations and became part of broader transformations.

Kelly also develops collaborative and experimental forms of research that bring the humanities into sustained conversation with STEM fields, social sciences, arts, and public life. With Fiona P. McDonald, he developed Anthropocenes, a cooperative tabletop game about the relationships between local decisions, global systems, and environmental change. His current collaborations span environmental sustainability and bioeconomies, data and AI literacy, information and library sciences, digital humanities, AI, historical GIS, and civic literacy. He is co-PI on INSECt: Insects for a Sustainable Environment and Circular Bioeconomy, where he leads the transdisciplinary research framework and the Human-Insect Nexus pillar, and on Data and AI Literacy in the Liberal Arts, which develops and studies curricular interventions in data and AI literacy. He also serves as co-PI on the Marble Map of Rome, a collaboration at the intersection of digital humanities, AI, information and library sciences, and historical GIS. He also leads Civics Kits, an intergenerational project that develops tools for understanding democratic institutions, practices, and participation.

As founding Director of the IU Indianapolis Arts and Humanities Institute, Kelly has built IAHI into a campus-wide center for research development, interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary collaboration, community-engaged scholarship, and student research. He sets the Institute’s strategic direction, develops new research collaborations, and works with faculty to move projects from initial ideas to funded research. Much of this work involves building partnerships beyond the university—with cultural organizations, communities, government, and other institutions—and creating opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students to participate in faculty and collaborative research. IAHI also provides seed funding, research development, and other forms of support that allow faculty to pursue projects that cross disciplinary and institutional boundaries.

Kelly has received support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, National Endowment for the Arts, National Science Foundation, Institute of Museum and Library Services, Mellon Foundation, Wenner-Gren Foundation, Lilly Endowment, and Allen Whitehill Clowes Charitable Foundation, among others. His honors include the IUPUI Research Trailblazers Award (2013), two IU Trustees Teaching Awards (2011, 2008), the IU School of Liberal Arts at IUPUI Student Council Outstanding Academic Adviser Award (2010), and the IU Bicentennial Medal (2021).