Jennifer Travis

Associate Professor
English
St. John Hall, Room B40-1
Queens campus
(718) 990-5608
travisj@stjohns.edu

Educational Background
Ph.D., 1996, Brandeis University, English and American Literature
M.A., 1994, Brandeis University, English and Women's Studies
B.A., 1989, Vassar College, English, with General and Departmental Honors

Jennifer Travis, Associate Professor of English, joined the St. John’s faculty in 1999.  Professor Travis specializes in U.S. Literature and Culture, Law and Literature, Gender Studies, Women's Literature, and Cross-disciplinary Approaches to Literary Study.

Her most recent book is titled Wounded Hearts: Masculinity, Law, and Literature in American Culture (University of North Carolina, Gender and American Culture Series, 2005).  From the Civil War to the early twentieth century, Wounded Hearts traces the history of male emotionalism in American discourse.  The book looks beyond the traditional categories of sentiment, sensibility, and sympathy to argue that  injury became a comfortable vocabulary—particularly among white middle-class men—through which to articulate and claim a range of emotional wounds.  The debates about injury that flourished in the cultural arenas of medicine, psychology, and the law spilled over into the realm of fiction, as the book demonstrates through readings of works by Stephen Crane, William Dean Howells, Willa Cather, Henry James, and Edith Wharton.  The book concludes by linking this history to twenty-first century preoccupations with “pain-centered politics,” which, it cautions, too often focuses only on women and racial minorities.

Professor Travis is also the co-editor of Boys Don’t Cry: Rethinking Masculinity and Emotion in the U.S. (Columbia University Press, 2002).  Boys Don’t Cry? examines an idea that we often take for granted, the idea that white, middle-class masculinity connotes total control of emotions, emotional inexpressivity, and emotional isolation.  As men seek their fortunes in the competitive worlds of business and politics, we assume their capacity for emotional expression often disappears.  How did this story of the emotionally stifled U.S. male come into being?  Through readings of works by Thoreau, Lowell, and W.E.B. Du Bois, and of twentieth-century authors such as Hemingway and Kerouac, this book questions the persistence of the emotionally alienated male in narratives of white middle-class masculinity and addresses the political and social implications of male emotional expression.  The wide range of discussions includes essays on film, law, and contemporary men’s movements such as the Promise Keepers. 

Professor Travis has published articles about masculinity, law and literature, and the politics of emotion in such journals as American Literary History, Modern Fiction Studies, Studies in American Naturalism, Arizona Quarterly, and Women's Studies.  She is the recipient of grants from the Humanities Institute at the University of Connecticut, the American Association of University Women, The Newberry Library, The Huntington Library, and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.  As a fellow at the UCHI 2007-2008, Professor Travis worked on her new book, The Call to Harms: Injury and Cultural Authority in America.  This project looks beyond the traditional literary categories associated with discussion of pain and feeling (such as sensibility, sentiment, and sympathy), to rethink the politics of pain in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and to argue that the rhetoric of injury promoted the causes of the structurally disempowered in novel ways.

Recently, Professor Travis has taught courses on women's literature, masculinity, trauma theory, U.S. finance and fiction, and emotionology, among others.