I am fascinated by the traces of the past in the present, and the traces of the present in the future.

This fascination guides all of my work, which falls into three main buckets. I am a: 

• PhD candidate at Johns Hopkins. A historian of the nineteenth-century United States, I am working on a dissertation about political and social organizing in response to grave robbing perpetrated by and for medical schools in the Northeast, mid-Atlantic, and Midwest. This work has been supported by the Drexel Legacy Center, and received the 2024 Shryock Medal from the American Association for the History of Medicine. I am a fellow in the Death + Data Lab—part of the LifexCode project—and also a Hugh Hawkins fellow, working on community-engaged public history and digital humanities projects around the human remains held by and in the university.
  

• Science journalist focusing on life on our changing planet. My reporting has appeared in the New Yorker, New York Times, New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Atlas Obscura, and elsewhere. My first book, Sewer, was published by Bloomsbury Academic in 2023. My next book, about trace fossils, is forthcoming from Random House.
  

• Collaborator nurturing projects that build towards a more empathetic and inclusive world. I work in community and solidarity with chronically ill and disabled writers, artists, scholars, and advocates as an editor of Tendon, a literary magazine at the intersection of medicine and the humanities. I am also building a physical and digital library of zines about patient experiences, which will live in special collections at the Welch Medical Library in Baltimore, MD.

For literary projects, I'm represented by Monika Woods at Triangle House. To discuss journalism assignments, you can reach me at jessicaleighhester.work[at] gmail dot com. For academic chats, please contact jhester6 [at] jh dot edu.