Jennifer James

Associate Professor of English

Jennifer James

Phone: 253-535-7217

Email: jamesja@plu.edu

Office Location: Hauge Administration Building - 201-C

  • Professional
  • Biography

Additional Titles/Roles

  • Chair, Gender, Sexuality, and Race Studies
  • Director, Native American & Indigenous Studies

Education

  • Ph.D., English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University, 2012
  • M.A., Comparative Literature, Dartmouth College, 2004
  • B.A., Comparative Literature, Smith College, 2001

Areas of Emphasis or Expertise

  • Post-1945 American Literature
  • Contemporary Canadian Literature
  • Gender and Queer Studies
  • Comparative Ethnic Studies
  • Cultural Memory Studies

Accolades

  • Karen Hille Phillips Regency Advancement Award, presented my accepted paper “London Calling: Dislocated Kinship and Transatlanticism in Baldwin’s Just Above My Head (1979)” at this year’s International Baldwin Conference in Montpellier, France

Biography

Jenny James was born and raised in Michigan, the home of the Great Lakes and the Michigan Wolverines. Before coming to PLU, she lived in Boston, Hanover, NH and New York City. Jenny teaches American literature from 1860 to the present, with a special emphasis on the representation of race, gender and sexuality in fiction written after 1945.  She also teaches a Writing 101 course on water, politics and place for the First Year Experience Program. Her research traces the development of narratives of affiliation in the post-1960 North American novel. In their depiction of alternative forms of loving friendship, these narratives emerged as a creative force to negotiate changing conceptions of social difference during the era.