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.
The courses that Professor Travis has taught include: Early
National American Literature, Antebellum American Literature,
Realism and Naturalism, Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers,
Nineteenth-Century African American Literature, Gender and the
Making of American Literature, Composition, Literary Criticism and
Theory
Graduate Courses: Treatments of Trauma in Literary Narrative,
Early American Women’s Writing, Literary Representations of Family
Ties, Interdisciplinary Approaches to Realism and Naturalism, What
is Emotion?, American Women Writers, Literature and the Other
Disciplines, Rethinking Masculinity, Separate Spheres?: Gender and
the Making of American Literature, Gender and Nineteenth Century
American Literature, American Bestsellers.