J. Jennifer Jones

Current Position

2005- Assistant Professor of British Literature — Department of English, University of Rhode Island

Previous Positions

2004-2005 Research Associate, Center for Humanities and the Arts, University of Colorado, Boulder; Visiting Assistant Professor, Department of English, University of Colorado, Boulder

2002-2004 Woodrow Wilson Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities — Center for Humanities and the Arts, University of Colorado, Boulder

Education

1997-2002 Ph.D., English Literature — University of California, Santa Barbara

Dissertation: Virtual Sublime: Romantic Transcendence and the Transport of the Real.
Alan Liu, Chair; Julie Carlson; Kay Young; Rita Raley

Virtual Sublime is a project that asks the following questions: What if the Romantic sublime were not about transcendence but instead a flickering between sensory immersion and emergence from the sensory? If "transport," to use Longinus's term, describes not the movement of the mind beyond material experience but instead the ghosting of overwhelming material experience into the mind? If, in other words, transcendence were really what contemporary theories of virtual reality-in many ways our latest inheritors of sublime theory-call "immersion"?

1995-1997 M.A., English Literature — High Honors, University of California, Santa Barbara

1990-1995 B.A., Modern Literary Studies and Theater Arts — Summa Cum Laude in Literature and College Honors, University of California, Santa Cruz

Honors and Awards

• Honorable Mention, Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies (INCS) Award for Best Journal Essay: "Absorbing Hesitation: Wordsworth and the Theory of the Panorama" (Studies in Romanticism, October 2006) (December 2006)
• University of Rhode Island Council for Research Grant for International Research (April 2006)
• University of Rhode Island Center for the Humanities Grant for International Research (April 2006)
• University of Rhode Island Foundation Grant for International Research (April 2006)
• University of Rhode Island Nomination for Teaching Excellence Award (2006)
• University of Rhode Island Center for the Humanities Subvention Grant (March 2006)
• Keats-Shelley Association Award for Best Essay in the Field, 2005: “Sounds Romantic: The Castrato and English Poetics Around 1800.” Presented at the KSA awards ceremony in Washington , DC (December 2005)
• Woodrow Wilson Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Humanities, University of Colorado at Boulder (2002-2004)
• Interdisciplinary Humanities Center Dissertation Fellowship (2001)
• President's Dissertation Year Fellowship (2000-01)
• Graduate Humanities Research Assistantship Program Fellowship (1999-00)
• Graduate Opportunity Fellowship (1998-99)
• UC Santa Barbara Tuition Fellowship (2002; 2001; 1997)
• UC Santa Barbara English Department Fellowship (1995-96)
• High Honors, M.A., UC Santa Barbara (1997)
• Summa Cum Laude in Literature & College Honors, B.A., UC Santa Cruz (1995)

Publications & Works in Progress

“Absorbing Hesitation: Wordsworth and the Theory of the Panorama.” Studies in Romanticism. October 2006.

“Sounds Romantic: The Castrato and English Poetics Around 1800.” Special Issue: Romanticism and Opera. Ed. Gillen D’Arcy Wood. Romantic Circles Praxis. May 2005.

Guest Editorship. Special Issue. Romantic Circles Pedagogy Commons: “Immersive Sublimity: Teaching as/through sublime (dis)identification” (Forthcoming 2008)

Review. Wordsworth’s Philosophic Song . By Simon Jarvis. Cambridge University Press, 2007. Romantic Circles (forthcoming)

“Upon Westminster Bridge : Panoramic Vision, Urban Technology, and Poetics from Romanticism to the 21st Century.” (Article in Progress, Summer 2006)

“Transporting: Longinus and the Practice of the Wordsworthian Sublime.” (Article in progress, Spring 2006)

Virtual Romanticism: Sublime Aesthetics and the Materiality of Experience. (Book manuscript in progress)

Conferences and Lectures

“Being Bad: Wordsworth, Inscription, and the Art of Graffito.” (Trans)National Identities / Re-imagining Communities. A Joint Conference of the Centro Interdisciplinare di Studi Romantici and the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism (NASSR). University of Bologne , Italy . March 12-15, 2008.

“Wordsworth, Coleridge, and the Nature of Perversity.” Invited Lecture. The Humanities Center Romantic Literature and Culture Seminar. Harvard University . March 13, 2007 .

“Romanticism and Italy : Castrati in London Around 1800.” Invited Lecture. Department of English. Colby College . November 3, 2006 .

"Wordsworth and the Nature of Perversity." 14th Annual North American Society for the Study of Romanticism (NASSR) Conference: Sciencia and Techne. Purdue University, West LaFayette, Indianna, August 31-September 3, 2006.

"Wordsworth and Coleridge: Panoramic Vision, Urban Technology, and Poetics." Coleridge Summer Conference. Cannington, Somerset, U.K. July 20-26, 2006.

"Romanticism: The Future of the Field." A symposium co-hosted by the Center for British and Irish Studies & by the Center for Humanities and the Arts. University of Colorado, Boulder, May 22-23, 2006.

“Passion as Compassion: From Aggress to Immersion in the Wordsworthian Sublime.” 20th Annual Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies Conference: Conflicts. Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey, March 30- April 1, 2006.

“The Nature of Perversity in Romanticism; or, Perverse Wordsworth.” Seminar: “Literary Perversions.” American Comparative Literature Association Annual Conference. Princeton University, March 23-36, 2006. [not in attendance]

“Transporting Rebellions: Longinus and the Practice of the Wordsworthian Sublime.” 13th Annual North American Society for the Study of Romanticism (NASSR) Conference: Deviance and Defiance. University of Montreal, Quebec, Canada. August 2005.

“Evidence and Its Ghosts” Year-long faculty seminar. Center for Humanities and the Arts, University of Colorado, Boulder. Participation with special presentations on Plato’s Theaetetus, David Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, and the writings of Immanuel Kant . 2004-2005 .

“Sounds Romantic: The Castrato and English Poetics Around 1800.” Department of English Faculty Lecture Series. University of Rhode Island . Spring 2005.

“The Rise and Fall of the Sublime Voice: The Castrato in Post-1750 London .” Special Session. Chair: Gillen D’arcy Wood. 12 th Annual North American Society for the Study of Romanticism (NASSR) Conference: Romanticism and Cosmopolitanism. University of Colorado , Boulder . September 2004.

“Wordsworth and the Romantic Panorama.” Wordsworth Summer Conference. Jonathan Wordsworth and Marilyn Gaul, Chairs. Grasmere , U.K. August 9-23, 2003 .

"Caves of the Real: Sublime Fiction and Mary Shelley's The Last Man." Romanticism and History: 10th Annual NASSR (North American Society for the Study of Romanticism) conference. University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, August 2002.

"Figuring Fictions: Wordsworth, Virtuality, and the Cave." Wordsworth's Second Selves: The Poetic Afterlife, 1798-2002. The Wordsworth Center, University of Lancaster, Lancaster, UK, July 2002.

"Romantic Imagining." The Eighth Annual Meeting of the American Conference on Romanticism. Miami University, Oxford, Ohio, November 2001.

"Virtual Sublime." Presented at the Dissertations-in-Progress series, UC Santa Barbara, Department of English, December 2000.

"Sublime Fiction and Knowledge in Time: Mary Shelley's The Last Man." NASSR (North American Society for the Study of Romanticism) Session: "Romantics after Romanticism." Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of Canada (HSSFC), University of Alberta, Edmonton, May 2000.

"The Perceptual Present: The Logic of Visibility in Millennial Victorian Period Film." Modern Language Association Annual Convention, Chicago, December 1999.

"The Futures of How We See the Past; or, Teleology, Eschatology, and Victorian Periodization." Dickens Project Conference, UC Santa Cruz, August 1997.

"Italian Opera, the Castrato, and 18th-Century British Dramatic Satire: The Beggar's Opera." Presented to Professor Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook's undergraduate course on Restoration and 18th-Century Literature, UC Santa Barbara, Winter 1996.

"Pre-Raphaelite Painting and Poetry: The Rossettis." Presented to the Nineteenth Century Studies Group, UC Santa Barbara, Winter 1996.

Research Assistant Experience

• Editorial Assistant to Eduardo Kac, School of the Art Institute of Chicago; Fall 2002
  —included copy-editing Professor Kac's project Telepresence, Biotelematics, and Transgenic Art.

• TRANSCRIPTIONS Project, Alan Liu, Director; 1999-2002, a National Endowment for the Humanities-funded educational experiment in the English Department at UC Santa Barbara, the goal of which is to demonstrate a paradigm-at once theoretical, instructional, and technical-for integrating new information media and technology within the core work of a traditional humanities discipline. Participation included:

  • member of a research team on original Transcriptions website ( http://transcriptions.english.ucsb.edu/archive ) and the new revised Transcriptions website, launched in the spring of 2002 ( http://transcriptions.english.ucsb.edu ). Work included site design & architecture, research, development, and writing.

  • technical workshops and support for undergraduate courses involving the new technologies (web research and citation, html, graphics, scanning, ftp)

  • supervised the research and online publication of the Winter 2002 issue of the undergraduate research journal, LCI Magazine

  • creation of Virtual Realities and Imaginative Literature, an online resource for scholarly research and tool for the theoretical and critical implementation of the new technologies into undergraduate/graduate English courses.

  • contributions to the Transcriptions Bookshelf,which showcases exciting, valuable works related to the new technologies & the humanities, including Stuart Moulthrop's groundbreaking hypertext "Victory Garden," Alfred Bester's novels The Stars My Destination and The Demolished Man, Orson Scott Card's science fiction novel, Ender's Game, the anthology of critical essays entitled Cyberspace Textuality: Computer Technology and Literary Theory, edited by Marie-Laure Ryan, and Slavoj Zizek's essay "From Virtual Reality to the "Virtualization of Reality."

  • contributions to the Transcriptions Guide to Electronic Literature,an annotated bibliography offering beginning readers of e-literature an initial view of the thematic, formal, and theoretical range of the new electronic genres and media of writing. Reviews I wrote in alphabetical order: Bill Bly, "We Descend," Carolyn Guyer, "Quibbling," Shelley Jackson, "Patchwork Girl," Michael Joyce, "Afternoon: a story," and Stuart Moulthrop, Victory Garden."

• Research & Development: VOICE OF THE SHUTTLE, a Website for Humanities Research, Alan Liu, Director; 1999-2002

• Research and Editorial Assistant to Victoria Vesna, Art Studio; Winter/Spring 1999
  —included copy-editing Professor Vesna's book as well as her special issue of the journal of AI & Society, both of which focus on art and the new technologies.

• Research and Editorial Assistant to Kay Young, English; Summer 1997
  —included research for and copy-editing of Professor Young's book on domestic comedy: performance, the couple, happiness in narrative.

• Research Assistant to Julie Carlson, English; Spring 1997
  —included research for Professor Carlson's writing project on domestic tragedy: 18th-and 19th-century drama, domesticity.

Teaching Experience at University of Rhode Island

English 610 European Romanticism and the Idea of Italy (Fall 2007)

Percy Bysshe Shelley once called Italy the “paradise of exiles,” and British Romantic-era writers such as John Keats, Mary and P.B. Shelley, Lord Byron, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge all lived in Italy as self-imposed exiles for a significant period in their lives. William Wordsworth’s reflections upon his visit to Italy during a walking tour in 1790 resulted in some of the most famous lines he ever wrote — the “crossing the Alps” lines that have become paradigmatic of the Wordsworthian sublime; Wordsworth, following Charlotte Smith, wrote hundreds of sonnets on the Petrarchan model; and both Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy studied the Italian language as adults. But what was these romantic-era writers’ investment in Italy , a culture stereotyped in Britain by the period around 1800 as violent, passionate, sexual, and typically feminine or effeminate? How has that investment been shaped by their understanding of Italian revolutionary politics, ranging from the secret rights of the Carbonari to the beginnings of the Risorgimento? To what extent was the idealization of Italy shaped by the complex issues of Catholic civil rights in Britain ? How can we better understand British and Continental Romanticism — generically, politically, culturally — by studying the relationship of the major writers to the idea of Italy ? Selections will include poetry, drama, short stories, novels, prose, and literary criticism.

* Also offered in a modified form to undergraduates as English 375 (Fall 2007)

English 553: The Sublime: Poetics and Politics of the Aesthetic in the Long Eighteenth Century and Beyond (Spring 2007)

This course is concerned with aesthetics, and in particular the sublime, as it forms and reforms in British and Continental theory, literature, and criticism between 1650-1800. If the study of aesthetics generally concerns the epistemology of artworks – the accounting for that area of human activity we engage in when producing, evaluating, or encountering artworks – then the driving question of the discourse of the sublime is, what causes and sustains aesthetic pleasure, and in what does that pleasure consist? Furthermore, being as it is concerned with greatness, the sublime requires us to confront the realm of judgement. How do we judge the relative merits, powers, and effects of artworks? How do we know when we are exercising “good” or “fair” judgement? Following that, we then must ask, what are the politics of the sublime? What are its politico-cultural effects?

This course explores the discourse of the sublime from the initial translation of Longinus’ Peri Hypsous into English in 1652 during the rise of English republicanism in treatises, prose essays, and poetry (John Hall, John Denham, John Milton, John Wilmot, Second Earl of Rochester, Robert Boyle, William Molyneux, George Heffernan); through its manifestations in neo-classical and eighteenth-century prose and poetry, as well as English and Continental philosophy (Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux, John Dennis, Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, Joseph Addison, René Descartes, Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, Richard Blackmore, Jonathan Richardson, Mark Akenside, William Collins, Thomas Gray); and finally to early German and English Romanticism through the period around 1800 (Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Schiller, Edmund Burke, Charlotte Smith, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Ann Radcliffe, and Jane Austen). The course also studies ground-breaking twentieth-century scholarship on the sublime in order to grasp the ways in which literary criticism and theory have created, reinforced, or expanded traditional narratives about the sublime in English literary culture, including such as Erich Auerbach, Thomas Weiskel, Neil Hertz, Slavoj Zizek, and Jean-Francois Lyotard.

* Also offered in a modified form to undergraduates as Honors 312 (Fall 2007)

English 375: Revolution, Revolt, and British Romanticism — Department of English, Kingston, Forthcoming Fall 2006

Scholars have long read English Romanticism in relation to the movements for democratic reform associated with the American and French revolutions. This course continues this investigation by considering how other political revolutions occurring in the same period alter (or not) the ideals and realities associated with Romanticism, those revolutions being efforts to emancipate women and slaves. Our chief points of focus are on abolition discourse and the revolt by slaves in Saint Domingue and on women’s literary participation in the various revolutions and controversies. How does our view of Romantic ideology change when we focus on English responses to slavery and the slave revolts of the 1790s? How do countervailing narratives by women and slaves affect definitions of rights, progress, self, imagination, empathy? How do they influence our dreams for social change now? What, finally, are the possibilities, the limits, and the politics of imagination?

English 263: Introduction to Poetry — Department of English, Kingston Spring 2006, Spring 2007

Reading poetry is a skill that can only be acquired through disciplined study. However, there is no end to the myriad pleasures poetry can offer you as a student and a human being once you become familiar with it. This course, a lower-division general education course, is designed to provide the technical training in poetics and interpretation required for students to become competent and confident readers of poetry and to refine the skills derived from this training so that poetic analysis becomes increasingly pleasurable as students become capable of engaging poetic texts with increasing levels of complexity. Topics covered include, but are not limited to, genre, form, meter & rhythm, rhyme, syntax, voice, tone, and figurative language. This class will focus primarily on British literature from the age of Queen Elizabeth I through the age of Queen Victoria , but there are a few twentieth-century exceptions and a few American exceptions as well.

English 252: British Literature: Romanticism to Modernism — Department of English, Kingston , Spring 2006

A lower-division general education course that surveys modern British literature broadly, from the period of British Romanticism (1770-1830) to the British Victorian period (1832-1900) to the period of emergent British Modernism (1900 and afterward). The focus of this course is twofold: one, to give students the opportunity to become more knowledgeable and comfortable with historical periodization and with historical texts in general; and two, to give them the opportunity to become more sophisticated and confident readers of literary texts, readers who takes pleasure in nuance, complexity, and interpretive discovery.

English 375: British Romanticism — Department of English, Kingston , Fall 2005

An upper-division course that surveys two moments of intensive literary production during the period of English Romanticism. The first of these points is the period around 1800, which includes such writers as William Godwin, William Burke, Helen Maria Williams, William Wordsworth, Mary Wollstonecraft, Thomas Paine, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The second point of emphasis in this course is the period around 1819, often termed the “second-generation” of romantic literary production, which includes Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, and John Keats. Although this course will survey many literary genres, it has been designed to give you an opportunity to study poetic form in particular depth, and to illustrate that studying poetry will enable you to think and read all literary texts more carefully, interestingly, and pleasurably both through your increasing capacity to analyze complex language and your increased understanding of literary history.

English 610: British Romanticism — Department of English, Kingston Fall 2005

A graduate seminar focused on major works of the British romantic period, emphasis on texts by writers associated with early romanticism (Mary Wollstonecraft, Thomas Paine, Edmund Burke, William Godwin, William Wordsworth, Dorothy Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge) but with a critical eye for studying how texts by those associated with later romanticism (Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, John Keats) continued or altered the political/literary discourse of the previous generation. This course will contemplate various narratives of origin that have traditionally defined the English romantic period, including romantic poetic form, the revolution controversy, and the major thematic preoccupations that can also be said to be definitive of the period, including the value of revolution; the definitions of liberty, freedom, and equality; fraternity, friendship, love, and passion; romantic imagination; romantic landscape and the sublime; and literature’s capacity to represent and/or effectuate socio-political and individual transformation. To augment our work on major romantic writers, we will study predecessor poets John Donne, John Milton, John Denham, and Alexander Pope; romantic-era philosophy; visual culture; and the writing of romanticist critics W. K. Wimsatt, Jr., M. H. Abrams, Geoffrey H. Hartman, Paul de Man, and Alan Liu, all of which helps to shape the period we know as English Romanticism today.

Teaching Experience at University of Colorado

English 4560 / 5560: English Romanticism — Department of English, Denver, Spring 2003

—graduate level proseminar on English Romanticism, including Godwin, Burke, Wollstonecraft, Paine, Blake, Smith, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Hazlitt, Southey, Byron, Keats, and the Shelleys; Romanticist criticism from the mid-twentieth century to the present; and philosophical & theoretical writings from both the Romantic era and the 20th century.

English 4574: The Later Romantics — Department of English, Boulder, Fall 2002

— upper-division undergraduate survey course on 'second generation' of Romantic writers, organized around Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, and Mary Shelley. A major focus in reading these figures is for students to discover how each takes up, transforms, and/or transcends critical conversations begun a generation earlier on the value of revolution; the definitions of liberty, freedom, and equality, fraternity, friendship, love, and passion; imagination; and literature's capacity to represent and effectuate socio-political and/or individual change.

Teaching Experience at UC Santa Barbara

English 189: Contemporary Literature — Department of English, Summer 2001

— upper-division undergraduate seminar on the post-1950 American novel, that studied manifestations of (and preoccupations with) human passion in mid-twentieth-century fiction-its utility as well as its excesses, its constructive as well as its destructive qualities, and in the private as well as the public context. Passion was identified and studied through various modes of transformation, notably transcendence, sublimity, liberalism, and radicalism. Texts: J. D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey; Alfred Bester, The Stars My Destination; Norman Mailer, Armies of the Night, E. L. Doctorow, The Book of Daniel.

English 40: Survey of Romantic and Victorian Literature — Department of English, Summer 1999

— lower-division historical survey focused primarily on poetry, which introduced poetic form; studied the way writers (from Blake to Hopkins) theorize and render the relationship of language to idea; studied the historical and political events associated with the Romantic period.

Writing 2: The Rhetoric of Disciplines — Writing Program, 1997-1998

— a required course for freshmen students at UCSB, which introduced the humanities, social sciences, and sciences through rhetoric. The focus was on how different academic disciplines gather & assess evidence and make progress in an academic field, how methodology suggests certain routes chosen to advance an argument, and how assumptions and beliefs affect interpretation. Readings: Plato, Descartes, Locke, Marx & Engels, Freud, Durkheim, Aristotle, Darwin, and Gould.

Teaching Assistant Positions:

English 103B: 19th Century British Literature, Julie Carlson, Spring 2001

English 40: 19th Century British Literature, Julie Carlson, Spring 1997

English 30: Restoration and 18th Century Literature, E. Cook, Winter 1997

English 117E: Shakespeare for Non-Majors, Frank McConnell, Fall 1996

Research and Teaching Interests

• British and European Romanticism

• British Literature 1660-1850

• Republicanism / Radicalism / Revolution

• The History of Imagination Critical Theory

• Aesthetics and Poetics: 1650-1850

• Humanities & New Media

• Visual Culture

• Romantic Opera

• Sadism & Masochism

• Romanticism and Italy

University and Academic Service

Director of Literature Teaching Assistants. Department of English, URI, 2006-2007; 2007-2008

Graduate Committee, Department of English, URI, 2007-2008

Graduate Admissions Committee, Department of English, URI 2007-2008

Publicity Committee. English Department Web Site — Design, Architecture, Implementation, and Upkeep. University of Rhode Island , Department of English, 2005-2007

URI “Four-Credit Course” Committee. University of Rhode Island, 2006-2007 .

Curriculum Committee. Department of Rhode Island, University of Rhode Island (2005-2006)

Guest Evaluator for Romantic Circles Highschool, Spring 2000. Romantic Circles High School, a National Endowment for the Humanities-funded subsection of the Romantic Circles Website, which uses new computing technologies to improve education at the high school level in British Romantic-era literature and culture and to try to bridge the pedagogical gap between secondary and post-secondary education.

Teaching Assistant Training Session Presentation: "Sequencing Questions in the Undergraduate Classroom" (Fall 1999, UC Santa Barbara)

Teaching Assistant Training Committee / Trainer (Fall 1998, UC Santa Barbara)

Master's Exam / First-Qualifying Exam Field Committee: Romantic and Victorian Literature (1997-1998, UC Santa Barbara)

Lectures Committee (1997-1998, UC Santa Barbara)

References

Alan Liu, Professor; Department of English, UC Santa Barbara
Phone: (805) 893-4673; email: ayliu@english.ucsb.edu

Julie Carlson, Professor; Department of English, UC Santa Barbara
Phone: (805) 893-8478; email: jcarlson@english.ucsb.edu

Jeffrey N. Cox, Professor of English, Comparative Literature, and Humanities
Phone: (303) 492-1931; email: jeffrey.cox@colorado.edu