Jennifer Summit

I teach courses on medieval and early modern English literature, including Chaucer, Shakespeare, and their lesser-known (particularly female) contemporaries. In my classes I foreground engaged student discussion and writing practice, close reading and textual analysis, and critical perspectives on the global Middle Ages and Renaissance--particularly the history of colonialism as a context for the emergence of English literary studies. Before joining San Francisco State as an administrator in 2014 I taught at Stanford for 19 years and published articles and books on textual production, women writers, and religious change in the medieval and early modern periods, including Lost Property: The Woman Writer and English Literary History, 1380-1589 (University of Chicago Press, 2000), Memory's Library: Medieval Books and Early Modern England (University of Chicago Press, 2008) and, with Blakey Vermeule, Action Versus Contemplation: Why an Ancient Debate Still Matters (University of Chicago Press, 2018).

I'm currently researching a project on educational stratification and the position of the California State University within the 1960 California Master Plan for Higher Education, a project I began as a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Studies in Higher Education, UC Berkeley. I earned my BA in English from Vassar College, my Ph.D. in English Literature from Johns Hopkins University, and a Certificate in Interreligious Studies from the Graduate Theological Union (Berkeley). I was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, and I'm passionate about public education, educational equity, and the historic mission of San Francisco State and the California State University system.