Jennifer Leigh Moffitt, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of English
My primary objective as a professor of literature and composition is to demonstrate how art and language shape our understanding of identity and history. To that end, I employ a constructivist approach that pushes students to consider the complex ways the texts we encounter everyday affect how we perceive the world, each other, and ourselves. Ultimately, I strive to empower students by helping them to hone their skills as critical consumers and producers of texts.
Biography
Dr. Moffitt received her B.A. in English with double minors in Art History and Women’s Studies from Appalachian State University, her M.A. in Literature from Humboldt State University, and her Ph.D. in Literature from Florida State University. Before joining Florida Southern as an Assistant Professor, she taught for seven years at Florida State, first as a graduate student and then as a Visiting Lecturer.
Her research and teaching interests include American literature, chiefly post-1865 American literature; women’s literature; realism and naturalism; cultural theory, especially critical analyses of gender, race, and sexuality; and visual culture studies, including word and image theory and illustrated texts.
Education
- Ph.D. Literature, Florida State University
- M.A. Literature, Humboldt State University
- B.A. English, Appalachian State University
Awards
Omicron Kappa Delta (ODK) Teacher of the Year, Florida Southern College, 2020
Nominated for a University Excellence in Teaching Award, Florida State University, 2017 & 2018
J. Russell Reaver Award for Outstanding Dissertation in American Literature or Folklore, Florida State University, 2015
Distinction in the Dissertation, Florida State University, 2014
Distinction in Doctoral Comprehensive Examinations, Florida State University, 2009
Nominated for Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award, Florida State University, 2008
Bryan Hall Award for Excellence in Teaching First-Year Composition, Florida State University, 2007
Conferences, Talks, and Panels
“A philosophy of the disembodied”: Text, Image, and Spectrality in Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me.” South Atlantic Modern Language Association, Virtual, November 2020.
Point of View Gallery Talk on “Flashback Female: Women Artists in the 1990s from the permanent collection,” Polk Museum of Art at Florida Southern College in Lakeland, FL, July 2019.
Collection in Focus Talk on “Women Artists in the Permanent Collection,” Polk Museum of Art at Florida Southern College in Lakeland, FL, February 2019.
Point of View Gallery Talk on “The Art of Romaine Brooks,” Polk Museum of Art at Florida Southern College in Lakeland, FL, November 2018.
“‘I tried to see her as you do’: Gendered Subjectivity and William Dean Howells’s The Coast of Bohemia.” American Literature Association, San Francisco, CA, May 2018.
Speaking of English, “Reconstructing Gender: Blake, Phelps, Chopin, and the Painter Heroine,” Florida Southern College in Lakeland, FL, November 2017.
“Representation and the Modern Female Subject: The New Woman Painter in Novels by Lillie Devereux Blake, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and Kate Chopin.” The Society for the Study of American Women Writers, Denver, CO, October 2012.
“Tomato Cans, Cholly Boys, and Studio Teas: Making and Re-Making the Modern Artist in Stephen Crane’s The Third Violet.” American Literature Association, San Francisco, CA, May 2012.
“(Re)Constructing the New Woman: The Painter Heroine and the ‘American Girl’ in the Popular Press.” Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies Association, Lexington, KY, March 2012.
“‘A wider scope of pursuits and professions’: Alice Barber Stephens and The Marble Faun.” Southern Atlantic Modern Language Association, Atlanta, GA, November 2011.
Panelist, “Getting Great Advising,” a panel sponsored by the Students’ Committee at the American Studies Association Conference in Albuquerque, NM, October 2008.
Session Co-Organizer, “Teaching Politics and the Politics of Teaching: Three Scholars Share Pedagogical Strategies,” a panel co-sponsored by the Students’ Committee and the Minority Scholars Committee at the American Studies Association Conference in Albuquerque, NM, October 2008.