Dr. Jennifer Travis
Professor and Department Chair
B.A., Vassar College
M.A., Brandeis University
Ph.D., Brandeis University
Research Focus: American Literature, Digital Humanities Gender Studies, Literary and Cultural History
Professor Travis is the author of Danger and Vulnerability in Nineteenth-Century American Literature: Crash and Burn (2018); and Wounded Hearts: Masculinity, Law, and Literature in American Culture (2005). She is the co-editor of Digital Humanities: Tools and Methods in Nineteenth Century American Literature (2018); and Boys Don’t Cry: Rethinking Masculinity and Emotion in the U.S. Currently, Professor Travis is co-editing a book on gender and American literature for a new Cambridge University Press series. Professor Travis has published articles in such journals as American Literary History, Modern Fiction Studies, Studies in American Naturalism, Arizona Quarterly, Legacy, and Women’s Studies. Find selections of her work at jennifertravis.wordpress.com.
At St. John’s, Professor Travis has been honored as the McNair Scholars Program Mentor of the Year; has been the recipient of the Legacy Award from the Society for Multicultural Affairs, and she has received St. John’s University’s Outstanding Achievement Award. She is the recipient of numerous research grants, including the Humanities Institute Grant from the University of Connecticut, the American Association of University Women American Fellows Grant, The Newberry Library Monticello Grant, and archival research grants from The Huntington Library and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.
A selection of Professor Travis’s courses include: American Women Writers and Wikipedia; Dead and Dying: American Women Writers and the Image of Death (a Service Learning Course in conjunction with the Maple Grove Cemetery Queens, NY); The Gothic Imagination; Gender and American Literature; True Blood: Vampires, Zombies, and the U.S. Novel; Global Literature; Distance Learning Pedagogy; English Studies in the Digital Age, Introduction to the Profession, and the Dissertation Workshop.