Jess Roberts
Professor of English
Jess believes in the community-making power of imaginative literature. She is the founding director of Albion’s Big Read, a program that aims to eradicate injustice inside and outside of the classroom by changing young people’s relationship to reading. She founded that program in 2015 with a group of outstanding people in Albion and runs it with the help of Nels Christensen. For more information about that program, please visit our website atalbionbigread.organd follow us on Instagram @albionbigread.
Education
- B.A., Dartmouth College
- M.A., University of Michigan
- Ph.D., University of Michigan
Courses
- Writing Essentials
- College Writing
- Professional Writing
- Anti-racism and Young People Literature
- Dealing with !@#$
- Writing Women in the Nineteenth Century
- Black Resistance in the Nineteenth Century
- Love in the Nineteenth Century
- The American Novel
- Literature of the American Civil War
- Whitman and Dickinson in Context
Publications
Jess’s most recent writing includes an essay called “Earned Trust and Albion’s Big Read,” which appears in the MLAs 2024 collectionSocial Justice in Action,and an article entitled ““The Poetess Laureate of Yoknapatawpha County: Rosa Coldfield and the Power of Convention” which appears in the Fall 2020 issue ofThe Faulkner Journal, published in 2024.
In addition, Jess’s has published essays on Sarah Piatt inESQ(2018),A History of Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Poetry(2017), andThe Cambridge Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Poetry(2011). You can find her pedagogical essays insouth:a scholarly journal48.2 (2016) andthe MLAsOptions for Teaching the Literatures of the American Civil War(2016). Her writing has also appeared inCallaloo and Oxford Bibliographies in American Literature.