Jennifer Hardy Williams, Assistant Professor, English
616-526-8515
jlw28@calvin.edu
Office: CFAC 276
Weekly Schedule
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- Educational Background
- Professor Williams completed her undergraduate and graduate work at the University of California, Irvine. She received her bachelor of arts summa cum laude in English literature, with a minor in European history. She went on to complete her master of arts and PhD in English literature with a dissertation titled Ghosts in the Machine: Modernism's Religious Other. Professor Williams joined the Calvin College English department in 2005.
- Academic Interests
- British modernism, critical theory, ethics and literature, deconstruction, comics and graphic novels, mini-comics, popular culture, anime and manga, mixed-media arts and twentieth-century aesthetic theory.
- Recent Activities
- Professor Williams is currently finishing a book on the ways in which female authors in the modernist period use religious discourse to form and contest identity. She received a grant from the Calvin Center for Christian Scholarship for the 2008-09 school year to do research for that project. For Interim 2011, Williams will be teaching a new course on Vampire Literature. She is also working on a project with Prof. Chris Smit from CAS on Lady Gaga and the erotics of consumer culture.
- Hobbies
- Drinking coffee, altered books, photography, gardening, watching movies (the quirkier the better) with husband Dale, searching for the perfect shade of violet for her dining room, playing with her kids Nathan and Zelda, laundry (she finds folding clothes very soothing), all things vampiric and drinking coffee.
- Favorite Books
- Lord Jim and The Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad; Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There by Lewis Carroll; Dracula by Bram Stoker; The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova; The Gift of Death by Jacques Derrida; the Sandman series and The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman; Hellsing by Kohta Hirano; Hellsing by Kohta Hirano; Black Butler by Yana Toboso; Alice in the Country of Hearts by QuinRose.
- Additional information
- Follow Williams's peculiar reading and movie viewing habits on her blog.
- Visit Questions Concerning Religion, Williams's academic website.
- Read “Modernism's Religious Other,” published in the Spring 2006 edition of English Language Notes.
- Download a curriculum vitae.
