Jennifer L Andersen
Contact
Bio
Some things about me:
My mother and father were the first generation in their families to attend college. My mother spoke English as a second language, having emigrated with her family from Europe in 1957.
I did my undergraduate degree in Classics at U.C.L.A.. Classics is a very interdisciplinary humanities major, touching on history, literature, political theory, philosophy, archaeology and art of the ancient Greek and Roman worlds in the original ancient Greek and Latin languages. I find it a thrilling sort of time travel hearing ancient people in their own words. They were certainly no less intelligent than we are, however different some of their values and concepts may be. My Ph.D. is in English Literature from Yale University. The training was extremely broad when I was there, with orals exams covering nine areas from Old English to contemporary literature. My teaching in English literature at CSUSB concentrates on the earlier history of literature, ranging from medieval literature to the Enlightenment. I have a special interest and expertise in comedy and satire from Aristophanes to Jonathan Swift. My approach to interpretation, shaped by my classical training and natural inclinations, tends to be historically oriented, situating texts in their social and intellectual contexts.
Education
PhD Yale University, English, 1996
MA Yale University, English, 1992
Fulbright Scholar, Tubingen Germany, 1988-89
BA UCLA, Classics, 1988
Courses/Teaching
First year College Latin
Historical Approaches to English Literature (ENG 2100)
Myth and Epic (ENG 3330)
Medieval, Sixteenth, and Seventeenth Century Literature (ENG 4010, 4030, 4060)
Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama (ENG 4750)
Major Satires of Jonathan Swift (ENG 4410)
Specialization
Early Modern English Literature
Political Satire. My work on early modern political satire is driven by a fascination with the verbal ingenuity of writers living under regimes where free speech is restricted yet who find ways to comment on taboo subjects. My latest work focusses on exaggeration, distortion, and stereotyping in polemics and political satire.
I studied Chaucer with V.A. Kolve, Marie Borroff, and Lee Patterson.
I studied Spenser with Seth Weiner and Susanne Wofford.
I studied Swift and Augustan Satire with Claude Rawson.
I studied Greek drama with M.L. West, Oliver Taplin, Richard Janko, Ingrid Rowland, and Sander Goldberg.
I studied Homer with Katherine King.
I studied Greek and Roman historians with Steven Lattimore and Sander Goldberg.
I studied Plato and Aristotle with Michael Haslam, Ann Bergren, and David Blank.
I studied Virgil and Catullus with Philip Levine.
Research and Teaching Interests
I teach early English Literature (and earlier Greek and Latin literature) as part of the humanities broadly conceived. We can learn from people who are not exactly like ourselves and we can learn from the past not to expect a consistency and coherence that we would never attempt or achieve ourselves.
Selected Publications
Editor with Elizabeth Sauer of Books and Readers in Early Modern England (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001).
Guest editor with Elizabeth Sauer of Literature and Religion in Early Modern England: Case Studies; a special issue of Renaissance and Reformation n.s. 25.4 (2001).
Anti-Puritanism, Anti-Popery and Gallows Rhetoric in Thomas Nashe's The Unfortunate Traveller Sixteenth Century Journal 35,1 (2004), 43-64. (8,700 words)
Thomas Nashe and Popular Conformity in Late Elizabethan England, Renaissance and Reformation n.s. 25,4 (2001), 25-43. (8,500 words)
Blame-in-Praise Irony in Lenten Stuffe, in Nashe and the Age of Print, eds. Joan Pong Linton, Stephen Guy-Bray and Steven Mentz (Ashgate, 2013). (9,500 words)
Nashe’s Poem for Ferdinando Stanley, Lord Strange, ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews 27, 3 (2014), 1-9. (5,000 words)
Rewriting a Murder Pamphlet: the Perspective of Deviance in The Changeling, Appositions: Studies in Renaissance/ Early Modern Literature & Culture 7 (2014). (10,000 words)
http://appositions.blogspot.com/
Eunapius’s Lives of Philosophers and Oratours as a Source in Biographies of Thomas Nashe and Francis Beaumont” Notes & Queries 71,3 (2024). (1400 words)
Forthcoming:
“Political Satire” in The Oxford Companion to Thomas Nashe, Jennifer Richards, Andrew Hadfield, Katherine DeRycker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming) (8,000 words)
‘Upon Appleton House’: Andrew Marvell and Perspectives of Civil War Print Culture” in Print Culture and Communication in the Stuart World ed. Kirsteen M. MacKenzie (Routledge, forthcoming) (7,000 words)
In-progress:
“Caricaturing the Puritan in Elizabethan Polemics: the Hacket Affair and Thomas Nashe’s Satire” – submitted to Huntington Library Quarterly and invited to revise and resubmit. Link to sound recording of conference paper: https://huntington.org/videos-recorded-programs/stereotypes-and-stereotyping
“Stereotype Threat in Francis Beaumont’s Knight of the Burning Pestle”
“Gulliver as Royal Favorite in Lilliput”