About Jean
I am an Assistant Professor of English at Canisius College in Buffalo, New York, teaching courses in postcolonial literature and film, travel literature, crime fiction, and cultural studies, as well as British literature surveys. My graduate degrees from The University of York and The Ohio State University are in English, but my scholarship has always been heavily influenced by the interdisciplinary project that goes by the name of cultural studies, as well as by a feminist and socialist politics. This has meant that my scholarly interests are wide, and over the years I have written articles and presented papers on quite diverse topics: feminist literary modernism; female psychogeography; contemporary Irish thrillers; U.S. pulp fiction of the 1930's; Victorian melodrama; David Livingstone's travels; country music; and prison art, among others. Current research focuses on the figure of the 'new ruin' in English travel literature and documentary film of the 1990's; and in particular, on the novelist W.G. Sebald and his impact on English travel writing and place-based art.
My Ph.D. dissertation, "Technologies of Culture: Self-Help and Masculinity in Nineteenth-Century Britain," explored Victorian discourses of upward mobility aimed at working-class men, tracking influential incarnations (Samuel Smiles, Dickens, Meredith, and Trollope, among others) and the relationship of self-help discourse to the beginnings of literary modernism. The last chapter of the dissertation reads George Gissing's novel Born in Exile alongside Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals in light of the precarious social position of the male intellectual and the anti-feminism characteristic of the late-Victorian period; this essay was published by the journal Nineteenth-Century Studies.
Until July 2008, I was a tenured professor of British and Postcolonial Literature at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. At that time the trustees of Antioch University, the larger entity of which the historic liberal arts College was one unit, chose to suspend operations at Antioch College and to terminate the tenure of all of its faculty. The College faculty, staff, students, and alumni refused to accept the closure and organized to save the institution, founding the Nonstop Liberal Arts Institute--also known as 'Antioch-in-Exile'--to sustain the College's educational mission and hold its community together until the alumni could raise the money to purchase the campus from the University. As a faculty member at the Nonstop Institute, I taught undergraduate-level literature and cultural studies courses off-campus in the Village of Yellow Springs, supported by the Antioch College Alumni Association. The College's legal separation from the University became official in September 2009, and a new board of trustees began the long process of rebuilding an independent Antioch College. Hired back by Antioch as one of several Arthur E. Morgan Fellows, I worked to lay the groundwork for the revived College: designing the new curriculum, preparing accreditation documents for the Higher Learning Commission, and bringing cultural life back to the campus. During this period I co-curated three visual arts exhibitions and programmed a creative writing series, three major films series, and numerous speakers on current events. Antioch College re-opened to students in the fall of 2011, but by that time, frustrated by certain administrative decisions with regard to faculty hiring, I opted to take a position at Canisius College and start afresh in Buffalo.
My involvement with the fight to save Antioch College led me to chronicle the events leading to the College's closing and the subsequent accomplishments of our educational experiment, the Nonstop Liberal Arts Institute. A condensed version appeared in Academe, and a fuller account in the journal Works and Days. Unsurprisingly, those years of upheaval inspired me to better understand the formidable challenges currently facing humanist scholars and liberal arts education--and to renew my long-standing commitment to equitable labor practices both within and outside of the contested zone of the academy.
--Buffalo, July 2014