Dr. Jessica Barr

Assistant Professor of English &
Director of the Honors Program at

Eureka College

	Current courses:
	ENG425W English Seminar
	Topic: Literature and the Technologies of Textual Production
	Syllabus; course blog
	ENG231W British Literature I
	Anglo-Saxon to Neoclassical
	Syllabus
	ENG103W Academic Writing and Research
	Syllabus
	Office hours (Fall 2009):
	Monday 11-12, Tuesday 9-11, Thursday 2-3.
	(My office is located in Burrus Dickinson 301.)

I teach British and European Literature; my usual courses include the British Literature surveys and seminars in British, European, and Classical Literature. In the past, I’ve taught seminars on Gender and the Body in the Middle Ages, Arthurian Literature, and “The Poetics of Inspiration,” a course in which we explored writing that claimed to be inspired by everything from God to opium. Next Spring (2010), I’ll be teaching a seminar on the European Bildungsroman, or “novel of formation”—a genre of literature in which the central idea is a young person’s transition to adulthood, usually involving misguided love affairs, dashed ideals, and a general process of disillusionment. We will explore the cheerful process of coming to terms with “the real world” in literary texts by major European authors such as Flaubert, Dostoevsky, Rilke, Goethe, Dinesen, Turgenev, and Stendhal.

My research focuses on medieval literature, particularly mystical and vision literature of the later Middle Ages. I am especially interested in women’s writing from the medieval period—by which I mean texts both by and about women. I have published in Mystics Quarterly (“The Meaning of the Word: Language and Understanding in Marguerite d’Oingt,” March/June 2007) and have an article forthcoming in Modern Philology (“‘No Fleschly Hert ne MiЗt Endeure’: Worldly Attachment and Visionary Resistance in Pearl”). My book, Willing to Know God: Dreamers and Visionaries in the Later Middle Ages, will be published in 2010 by Ohio State University Press.

I earned a B.A. in English with a creative writing concentration at Oberlin College in 1997, and my M.A. (2003) and Ph.D. (2007) in Comparative Literature at Brown University. In the fall of 2007, I joined Eureka’s faculty where, in addition to directing Eureka’s Honors program, I am the faculty advisor for the Theta Lambda chapter of Sigma Tau Delta, the International English Honor Society.

Off-campus, I enjoy fiction of all kinds (both reading and writing it), yoga, cooking, knitting, book-binding, and travel. Most recently I spent a month in France, but in the last few years I’ve traveled as far as Cambodia and China.

Contact me:

Eureka College

300 East College Avenue

Eureka, Illinois 61530

(309) 467-6337

jbarr@eureka.edu