Dr. Jessica Barr

 

Assistant Professor of English &
Director of the Honors Program at


Eureka College

 

 

Current courses (see below for syllabi):

ENG425W Seminar in English: Feminism and Literature
425 is the capstone course for the English major. This year, we’re exploring feminist theory as an approach to literary interpretation.

 

ENG231 British Literature I:
Anglo-Saxon to Neoclassical

 

ENG103W Academic Writing and Research

 

IDS101H First-Year Seminar (Honors Section)
Topic: Poverty: A Liberal Arts Approach

 

Office hours (Fall 2010):

Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday 10-11, and by appointment.

(My office is located in Burrus Dickinson 301.)

 

Essential handouts for each course:

 

 

Essential handouts for Honors students:

 

Recent courses:

 

  • ENG425W English Seminar: Literature and the Technologies of Textual Production, Fall 2009 (Syllabus; blog)
  • ENG350W Seminar in Continental European Literature: The European Bildungsroman, Spring 2010 (Syllabus)
  • ENG233 British Literature II: Romanticism through the Twentieth Century, offered every Spring (Syllabus)

 

 

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 semester (Spring 2011), I will be teaching a seminar in British Literature (ENG330W) that will focus on Chaucer and his world—the literary, philosophical, and cultural context in which he wrote. I will also teach ENG233 and IDS262 (Western Civilization II)  in the Spring.

 

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 had an article accepted for publication in Modern Philology (“‘No Fleschly Hert ne MiЗt Endeure’: Worldly Attachment and Visionary Resistance in Pearl”). I also have an article on the thirteenth-century mystic Beatrice of Nazareth forthcoming in Exemplaria, and an exploration of the role of the creative imagination in medieval visions of the Otherworld slated to appear this Fall in Connotations: A Journal of Literary Debate. My book, Willing to Know God: Dreamers and Visionaries in the Later Middle Ages, will be published in September 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 and a week reading medieval manuscripts in Belgium, 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