About Jennie
My teaching and scholarship challenge the centrality of nation and periodization to literary studies, exploring minor spaces—smaller than nations or regions—as literary archives with vast temporal boundaries.
I teach courses in literature and writing in community colleges, prisons, international exchange programs, and traditional four-year institutions.
My writing tarries in cities, alleys, sidewalks, hotels, and houses across centuries, nations, and overdetermined literary epochs. Trauma, I argue, scrambles time and shreds map. Writing on trauma can benefit from following scraps and fragments outside of conventional archives and schematic histories.
Works in Progress
Porgy’s Cart: The South’s Weird Century. The hero of George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess transits the streets of Charleston in a goat cart. My book in progress—a hybrid work of scholarship and travel writing—offers a roadside history of Southern culture in the slower vehicle of the goat cart. It tarries in Charleston’s Catfish Row, in the suburbs of New Orleans (authorized by film tax credits to play any city), and in serial killers’ dump sites along the Mississippi Gulf Coast.
The Chef’s Sabbath is a memoir of addiction and recovery, organized around a series of Mondays: the day that New Orleans restaurants lock their doors. The memoir tarries with the paradoxes of regret, resentment, and recovery, and narrates the explosive affair that preceded my decision to get sober.