Jennifer has policy interests in STEM-SHAPE collaboration, digital humanities, and advocacy for the humanities, English curriculum reform, and skills for the future. She is Chair of The English Association, and works closely with the Institute for English Studies, London, and University English.

Research Interests

Jennifer's expertise includes the history of reading, the history of rhetoric and the history of the book, and she approaches all three through a focus on the physical voice.

She is co-leading a Leverhulme Trust-funded Research Project (2022-25) exploring emotions and bees with software engineers, digital humanists, literary scholars, musicians, musicologists, bio-environmental scientists: Bee-ing Human: an interactive bee book for the 21st century. The digital book will include a born-digital edition of Charles Butler's The Feminine Monarchie of Bees (1609, 1623, 1634), data from Vivek Nityananda's and Balumurali G.S's science lab, new musical composition, with an account of the collaboration. This research 'hive' is divided between Newcastle and Cambridge Universities.

You can read about the plans in the Leverhulme Trust 2021 Annual Review here. You can follow the progress of Bee-ing Human on GitHub.

Biography

Jennifer came to Cambridge via South Wales, London, Poland (Gliwice and Warsaw), Edinburgh, and Newcastle upon Tyne.

Her love of literature began at St Martin's Comprehensive School, Caerphilly, thanks to her brilliant teachers. She studied for her BA in English Literature at Queen Mary College, University of London. In the late 1980s she taught English Language at the Silesian University of Technology, Gliwice, and the Polish Academy of Science, Warsaw, before returning for doctoral study at the University of Edinburgh. She took up a lectureship in English Literature at Newcastle University in 1995, where she was the first woman to hold one of the oldest chairs in English Literature within the UK (established 1898), the Joseph Cowen Professorship, from 2016 to 2023.

She is now the English (2001) Chair in the Faculty of English at Cambridge University, and a Visiting Professor at Newcastle University.

She is a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA), a Fellow of the English Association (FEA) and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society (FRHistS).