Individual Scholar Page

Personal Info

Photo

About Me

I am a historian and Humanities Instruction Librarian at Georgia State University, where I currently support the departments of Africana Studies, Communication, Philosophy, Religious Studies, and the Institute of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. I hold a PhD in US History from Rutgers University (minor, Women’s/Gender History) and an MSIS from the University of Texas at Austin.

My research interests as a historian are currently focused on post-World War II girls’ creative and intellectual history. My article on girls’ book reviews in Seventeen magazine from 1958 – 1969 was published online in the Journal of American Studies in December 2020. This article is part of a larger project on postwar girls’ intellectual culture with particular emphasis on girls’ creative work and identities. I have also published an article on Anne Emery’s “Dinny Gordon” junior-novel series (1959-1965), which examines the positive representation of series heroine Dinny Gordon as an unapologetically intellectual girl who is portrayed has having supportive friends and boyfriends (see “Dinny Gordon, Intellectual: Anne Emery’s Postwar Junior Fiction and Girls’ Intellectual Culture” in publications.)

My research interests as a librarian are in primary-source literacy and archival literacy. I currently have six years of experience partnering with archivists as co-instructors for courses in History, English, Language Arts (Education), and Philosophy.

I have also developed “Teaching with Primary Sources,” a series of train-the-trainer workshops for faculty and graduate instructors focusing on creative uses of archival materials and other primary materials, in partnership with Kevin Fleming, my institution’s Popular Music and Culture Archivist; this is an outgrowth of a previous series, “Teaching with Archival Sources,” co-taught with Morna Gerrard, my institution’s Women, Gender, and Sexuality Archivist.

Mr. Fleming and I have published on our work together. In fall 2019 we received the Georgia Historical Records Advisory Council Award for Excellence in the Educational Use of Historical Records (for our instructor workshop series). In early 2020, we also received Georgia State University’s Faculty Instructional Innovation award (along with Prof. Ewa McGrail of Education/Language Arts) for our co-instruction and instructional design for Prof. McGrail’s graduate Children’s/Adolescent Literature course.

For three semesters (Fall 2015, 2016, and 2018) I have also taught a freshman Honors seminar, “‘Going Steady?’: Documenting the History of Dating in American Culture, 1940-1990,” a hybrid History/Women’s Studies/information literacy course which focuses on primary-source searching and interpretive skills. The most recent version of this course is available here: http://research.library.gsu.edu/datinghistory.

Recent Publications

“‘A Friend, A Nimble Mind, and a Book’: Girls’ Literary Criticism in Seventeen Magazine, 1958-1969,” Journal of American Studies, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021875820001693.

“Trading Eights: Teaching Collaboratively with Primary Sources,” with Kevin Fleming, Journal of Creative Library Practice (October 2019), http://bit.ly/2Pfot5P.

“Follow the Footnote,” with Marni Davis, History Teacher 52, no. 3 (May 2019): 477-498, http://bit.ly/2nXRO9B.

“‘Going Steady?’: Documenting the History of Dating in American Culture, 1940-1990,” Syllabus 6, no. 1 (June 2017), http://bit.ly/2vGD9lQ.

“Crossing Disciplines, Creating Space: Using Drop-In Research Labs to Support an Interdisciplinary Research-Intensive Capstone Course,” with Jason Puckett, Practical Academic Librarianship 4, no. 1 (2014): 1-14, http://bit.ly/1Bn3dQp.

“Dinny Gordon, Intellectual: Anne Emery’s Postwar Junior Fiction and Girls’ Intellectual Culture,” Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 7, no. 2 (Spring 2014): 243-266, doi: 10.1353/hcy.2014.0027.

“Using Professional Forums to Assess Historians’ E-resource Needs,” Collection Building 28, no. 1 (January 2009): 4-8, doi: 10.1108/01604950910928457. Honorable Mention, Emerald MLS Student Best Paper Award, 2008.

“‘Be Up and Doing’: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Poetic Labor,” Journal of American Studies 37, no. 1 (April 2003): 1-15, doi: 10.1017/S0021875803006972.

Dissertation, “‘Nothing Done!’: The Poet in Early Nineteenth-Century American Culture,” directed by Jackson Lears and Jan E. Lewis (2000), https://rucore.libraries.rutgers.edu/rutgers-lib/42513/

Media Coverage

Social Media

@jillian6475

Country Focus

Expertise by Geography

United States

Expertise by Chronology

Modern, 20th century

Expertise by Topic

Children & Youth, Gender, Libraries & Archives, Literary History, Pedagogy