Jennifer Jahner
Professor of English; Dean of Undergraduate Students
B.A., Western Washington University, 1998; M.A., University of Colorado at Boulder, 2005, Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania, 2012. Assistant Professor, Caltech, 2012-19; Professor, 2019-; Dean, 2023-.
Profile
Jennifer Jahner's research spans the long histories of rhetoric, law, and natural philosophy, focusing, in particular, on the European Middle Ages and its role in shaping our still-evolving understanding of rights, evidence, perception, and proof. Her research and teaching interests also include manuscript studies, visual culture, gender and sexuality studies, and history of
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Research Summary
Medieval Literature; Poetics; Law; History of Science; Gender and Sexuality Studies; Visual Culture; Manuscript Studies
Selected Awards
- American Council of Learned Societies Fellow, 2019–2020
- Graves/ACLS Award in the Humanities, 2018–2019
- Borchard Foundation Grant, 2018
- Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences Brass Award for Teaching, 2015–2016
- Associated Students of Caltech (ASCIT) Teaching Award, 2012–2013
Caltech Affiliations
External Affiliations
- Book review editor, Studies in the Age of Chaucer
Featured News
What the Past Can Tell Us About Forecasting the Future
February 20, 2024
Jennifer Jahner is revealing the history of predictions by digging through ancient and medieval texts.
A Toast to the 2022 Brass Division Award Winners
December 14, 2022
At the HSS holiday gathering on December 6, Tracy Dennison, Edie and Lew Wasserman Professor of Social Science History and Ronald and Maxine Linde Leadership Chair of the Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences, announced the recipients of the 2022 Brass Division Awards (BDA).
Watson Lecture on April 13: Jennifer Jahner on How COVID Changed the Way People Think and Talk about Risk
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April 06, 2022
On Wednesday, April 13, at 5 p.m. PDT, Jennifer Jahner, Caltech professor of English, will continue the 2021–22 Watson Lecture season with "The Rhetoric of Chance in Times of Pandemic."
Selected Publications
- Gender, Poetry, and the Form of Thought: Essays in Honor of Elizabeth A. Robertson (forthcoming, Lehigh University Press, 2022)
- Literature and Law in the Era of Magna Carta (Oxford University Press, 2019)
- Medieval Historical Writing in Britain and Ireland, 500–1550, co-edited with Emily Steiner and Elizabeth Tyler (Cambridge University Press, 2019)
- "Literary Therapeutics: Experimental Knowledge in MS Digby 86," in ed. Susanna Fein, Manuscript Digby 86: Devotion, Science, and Literary Diversions for a Worcestershire Household c. 1280 (York Medieval Press, forthcoming)
- "Chaucer's Aesthetic Resources: Nature, Longing, and Economies of Form," in ed. Thomas Prendergast and Jessica Rosenfeld, Chaucer and the Subversion of Form (Cambridge UP, 2018), pp. 38–60.
- "Verse Diplomacy and the English Interdict," Thirteenth Century England 15 (2015): 99–114.
- "Reading for the End: Prescriptive Writing and the Practice of Genre," Exemplaria 27 (2015): 18–27.
- "The Mirror of Justices and the Art of Archival Invention," Viator 45 (2014): 221–46.