Individual Scholar Page

Personal Info

Photo

About Me

Jennifer L. Lieberman is an assistant professor of English at the University of North Florida (UNF), and author of Power Lines: Electricity in American Life and Letters, 1882-1952, which was published by the MIT Press in 2017. If you’re interested to hear about the book before you buy it or check it out from your library, you can listen to this “Cultures of Energy” podcast, where Dominic Boyer and Cymene Howe interview Jennifer about the book.

At the University of North Florida, Jenni won an Outstanding Undergraduate Teaching Award in 2018. She was a 2016-2017 Community Scholar in the Center for Community Based Learning, she is the 2017 Fellow for the Florida Blue Center for Ethics, and she earned UNF’s Presidential Diversity and Inclusion Award in 2017 for her exceptional work in the classroom and community. The student honor society, Sigma Tau Delta, also presented her with an award for excellence in teaching in 2015.

Before she started this position, she completed her Ph.D. in English at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in May 2011, when she graduated with distinction and with a minor in gender and women’s studies. She also holds a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics and a Bachelor of Arts in English from the University of Florida. From 2011-2013, she was a postdoctoral fellow in Cornell University’s Department of Science and Technology Studies (STS). An interdisciplinary scholar, Jennifer has held fellowships at the Bakken Library and Museum, the Smithsonian Institution, the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities, and the National Science Foundation. The research she conducted in these intellectual communities suffuses her teaching and her other scholarly endeavors. In addition to her book, her recent work can be found in  Studies in the Novel (2017), JLS (the journal of literature and science, 2017),  Configurations (with Ronald Kline, 2017), History and Technology (2016), The Eaton Journal of Archival Science Fiction (2016), MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature in the US (2015), in the collection of original work, Demands of the Dead: Executions, Storytelling, and Activism(University of Iowa, 2012), and in the Mark Twain Annual (2010). Since 2004, she has taught courses to conventional and incarcerated college students on topics including composition, gender and women’s studies, the history of medicine, STS, and American literature and culture including work by multiethnic writers. Her current book project, tentatively titled The Literary and Technological Imaginaries of the American Prison, examines the prison using methodologies from literary studies and STS.

Recent Publications

Books (1)

Power Lines: Electricity in American Life and Letters, 1882-1952. Cambridge, MIT Press: 2017.

Peer-Reviewed Articles (9)

“Women’s Power in the American West: Mary Hallock Foote and Honoré Willsie Morrow’s Tales of Electrification.” Studies in the Novel 49.3 (2017): 342-362.

 

“Finding a Place for Technology.” JLS: Journal of Literature and Science 10.1 (2017): 26-31.

 

Lieberman, J. and Ronald R. Kline. “Dream of an Unfettered Electrical Future: Nikola Tesla, the Electrical Utopian Novel, and an Alternative American Sociotechnical Imaginary.” Configurations 25.1 (January 2017): 1-27.

 

“Recovering John Trowbridge: A Master of Electricity, Education, and Sentimentality.” The Eaton Journal of Archival Science Fiction 4.1 (2016): 4-24.

 

“The Myth of the First African-American Electrical Engineer: Arthur U. Craig and the Importance of Teaching in Technological History.” History and Technology 32.1 (2016): 70-90.

 

“Ralph Ellison’s Technological Humanism.” MELUS: Multi-ethnic Literature in the U.S. 40.4 (Winter 2015): 8-27.

 

“Electric Sensations and Executions in Gertrude Atherton’s Patience Sparhawk and Her Times.”

Demands of the Dead: Executions, Storytelling, and Activism in the United States. Ed. Kathleen Ryan. University of Iowa Press, 2012: 162-180.

 

“Hank Morgan’s Power Play: Electrical Networks in King Arthur’s Court.” The Mark Twain Annual 8 (2010): 61-75.

 

Lieberman, J. and Bruce Edwards, “The Convergence of the Hyperbolic Function of the CORDIC Algorithm,” Hellenic European Research on Computer Mathematics and its Applications 6 (2003): 3-5.

 

Reviews (3)

Grant Bollmer, Inhuman Networks: Social Media and the Archaeology of Connection. Screen Bodies, forthcoming.

 

Lauren Rabinovitz, Electric Dreamland: Amusement Parks, Movies, and American Modernity. American Studies Journal 53.1 (2014): 225-6.

 

Lawrence I. Berkove and Joseph Csicsila’s Heretical Fictions: Religion in the Literature of Mark Twain. American Studies Journal 52.1 (2012): 185-6.

Media Coverage

Social Media

@ThenJenniSaid

Country Focus

Expertise by Geography

United States

Expertise by Chronology

19th century, 20th century, 21st century

Expertise by Topic

Gender, Medicine, Pedagogy, Race, Science, Technology, Women