About Me
Jennifer L. Lieberman is the Director of the Office of Interdisciplinary Programs, overseeing Africana Studies, Interdisciplinary Studies, and International Studies, as well as an associate professor of English at the University of North Florida (UNF). In addition to directing Interdisciplinary Programs, she also serves as a team leader for the General Education working group, she was the former graduate coordinator for English, Rhetoric, and Composition, and she has served on various leadership roles throughout the university.
She is the author of Power Lines: Electricity in American Life and Letters, 1882-1952, which is available from MIT Press. 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. Her book earned honorable mention for the Michelle Kendrick Book Prize from the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts (SLSA) in 2019.
Some of the awards Jenni has recently earned include a Humanities and Arts Research Grant in 2022; Outstanding Faculty Scholarship Award in 2020; Outstanding Undergraduate Teaching Award in 2018; a Kettering Foundation research exchange grant in 2018-2019; a 2016-2017 Community Scholar award from the Center for Community Based Learning; and a fellowship from the Florida Blue Center for Ethics in 2017. She earned UNF’s Presidential Diversity and Inclusion Award in 2017 for her exceptional work in the classroom and community.
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 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 the Edinburgh Companion to Modernism and Technology (2022); Transatlantic Currents (2021); Ralph Ellison in Context (2021); Routledge Handbook of Art, Science, and Technology Studies (2021); Science Fiction Film and Television (2018); 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/rhetoric/communication, gender and women’s studies, the history of medicine, Science and Technology Studies, and American literature and culture including work by multiethnic writers. Her current book project, tentatively titled The Pursuit of Perfectible Punishment, examines the prison using methodologies from literary studies and STS.
