In May of 2023, I began a new role at the University of Minnesota, Crookston, when I become Senior Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs. Read more about my selection by clicking on the caption to the graphic above. I joined the University in Crookston in July, 2022, as Professor of English and Division Head for Business, Arts, and Education. I am an elected member of the Executive Council of the Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Study (Language and Literature representative 2021-2025), and I have been on the editorial advisory board of the Journal of Popular Culture since 2008. Other professional experience includes serving five times as co-director and teaching faculty on Michigan State University’s English Department Summer Program in Dublin and the West of Ireland between 2001 and 2013.
From 2006 to 2022 I was at Governors State University, south of Chicago. I first joined the GSU community as a member of the faculty, teaching upper-division and graduate courses in literature and popular culture for GSU’s English programs. In 2015, my teaching, research, and service were recognized by a Faculty Excellence Award, one of three given campus-wide each year. For four years beginning in May of 2018, I served as Associate Provost and Associate Vice President of Academic Affairs. Concurrent with that service, from January 2020 through February 2022, I was Interim Dean of the University Library.
Book on Public Scholarship
I co-edited Public Scholarship in Literary Studies (2021); see my website’s events page for information about a recorded book launch in March 2021. The volume concludes with my essay, “Literary Study Writ Large,” and the cover design uses my photo. I am proud to bring out work on this topic via the Amherst College Press peer-reviewed, digital-first, open-access platform.
Research overview: I have published a book, Contemporary Feminist Historical Crime Fiction (Palgrave Macmillan), and articles on crime fiction, Irish literature, and public scholarship (see “Public Scholarship: Making the Case” in Modern Language Studies). Moving into the contemporary period from a foundation in the Anglo-American tradition, my crime-fiction research also includes Irish, Swedish, and Norwegian writers. I have published on Tana French, Gene Kerrigan, Louise Phillips, and other Irish crime novelists, and I wrote an essay on the feminist worldviews of Swedish women crime writers Camilla Läckberg, Liza Marklund, and Helene Tursten for the the Los Angeles Review of Books. In Contemporary Feminist Historical Crime Fiction, I examined the feminist historiography of women crime novelists who fused historical research, a feminist effect, and carefully-constructed crime plots to teach readers about women’s history. Since then, my focus has been on crime fiction’s representations of contemporary urban spaces and on the emerging subgenre of domestic noir. I was the 2021 winner of the George N. Dove Award, bestowed annually by the United States Popular Culture Association’s Mystery and Detective Fiction Area for “outstanding contributions to the serious study of mystery, detective, and crime fiction.” I am honored to be recognized by the PCA’s career scholars of crime fiction and to join the illustrious ranks of Dove Award winners.
My dissertation was the first in North America on the English novelist and playwright Patrick Hamilton (1904-1962), and I published an essay on his 1938 play Gaslight: A Victorian Thriller as the source text for the phenomenon known as gaslighting in the Los Angeles Review of Books: “On the Origins of Gaslighting.” The inter-war period remains one of my teaching and research areas; my publications include “Dorothy L. Sayers and Virginia Woolf: Perspectives on the Woman Intellectual in the late 1930s” in the Virginia Woolf Miscellany (2015) , “Thinking Through Crime: F. Tennyson Jesse” in the Mystery Tribune (2017), and “Edith Meiser as The Woman of the Sherlock Holmes interwar radio serial” in Feminist Modernist Studies (2023).
August, 2023
Email: rosemaryj5212@gmail.com
