Jennifer James
Chair, Gender, Sexuality, and Race Studies
- Professional
- Biography
Additional Titles/Roles
- Director, Native American & Indigenous Studies
- Associate Professor of English
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.