Jennifer Hardy Williams, Assistant Professor, English
616-526-8515
jlw28@calvin.edu
Office: LN 161 (directions)
Weekly Schedule
(Knightvision login required)
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—particularly mini-comics, 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 has also received a grant from the Calvin Center for Christian Scholarship for the 2008-09 school year to do research for that project. Combining her interests in mixed-media arts and theory, Professor Williams co-teaches an interim course called Talking Pictures with Professor Chad Engbers. Her next project will be on the ways in which mini-comics work as a form of embodied religious practice.
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.
Additional information
Following 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.
Read about Talking Pictures, an interim course co-taught with Chad Engbers.
Download a curriculum vitae.
