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Department of English Language and Literature

Directory

Jennifer Blevins

Title: Instructor
Department: English Language and Literature
College of Arts and Sciences
Email: jblevins@email.sc.edu
Office: HOB 421
Jennifer Blevins

Education

PhD, University of South Carolina
MFA, University of South Carolina
MA, Wake Forest University
BA, Wake Forest University

Areas of Specialization

20th and 21st Century American Literature
American Women Writers
Fat Studies
Creative Nonfiction Writing
Medical Humanities
Gender Studies

Courses Taught

SAEL 200: Social Advocacy and Ethical Life
ENGL 101: Critical Reading and Composition
ENGL 102: Rhetoric and Composition

Selected Awards

Bridge Humanities Postdoctoral Teaching Fellowship (2020-2023)
Russell J. and Dorothy S. Bilinski Dissertation Fellowship (2019-2020)
Autumn House Press Full-Length Nonfiction Prize (2018)
Breakthrough Graduate Scholar Award, University of South Carolina (2016)

Publications

   • “‘Limited by Body Habitus’: Fat and Stigmatizing Rhetoric in Medical Records.” In Weight Bias in Health Education: Critical Perspectives for Pedagogy and Practice. Edited by Heather Brown and Nancy Ellis-Ordway. Routledge, 2021.
   • “‘I Ain’t You’: Fat and the Female Body in Flannery O’Connor.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, Vol. 39, No. 1 (Spring 2020).
   • Limited by Body Habitus: An American Fat Story. Autumn House Press, 2019. *Winner of the 2018 Autumn House Press Full-Length Nonfiction Prize
   • “Equilibrium, or My Mother Would Have Felt the Same Way.” The Boiler Journal. January 1, 2016.

Presentations

   Guest author in Federica Schoeman’s graduate class “‘Cherchez la femme!’: A Feminist (Hence Disruptive) Study of the Western Intellectual Canon” (ENGL 803) to speak about my book. University of South Carolina, April 17, 2023.
   “‘Limited by Body Habitus’: Combatting Fat Stigma in the Medical Industry, the University, and Beyond.” South Carolina State University, September 18, 2020.
   “The Medical Gaze, Trauma, and Heteroglossia in Limited by Body Habitus: An American Fat Story.” Trauma, Narratives, Institutions: Transdisciplinary Dialogues. Johns Hopkins University, November 15, 2019.
   Excerpts from Limited by Body Habitus: An American Fat Story. American Culture Association/Popular Culture Association National Conference in Washington, D.C., April 19, 2019. Panel chair.
   “A Summer of Spillage: My Father’s Gastric Bypass and the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill.” American Culture Association/Popular Culture Association National Conference in Seattle, Washington, March 22, 2016. Panel chair.
   
“‘This thing that she had done to herself’; Female Mobility and Agency in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand.” MELUS (The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States) National Conference in Charleston, South Carolina, March 4, 2016.
   “Refiguring Fat Bodies: The U.S. ‘Obesity Epidemic’ and Grosz’s Volatile Bodies.” American Culture Association/Popular Culture Association National Conference in New Orleans, Louisiana, April 2, 2015.
   “‘I’m split in two’: The Psychosexual Consequences of the Holocaust for two young girls – Anne Frank and Milena Roth.” Women and the Holocaust: Cultural Productions and Interpretations – The 17th Annual Comparative Literature Conference at University of South Carolina, March 2, 2015.
   “‘That was them not us’; Adrienne Rich’s Post-9/11 Political Poetry and the Frames of War.” “I Live Here!: Negotiating Notions of Public and Private” Conference at North Carolina State University, February 23, 2013.
   “Breaking the Frames in Adrienne Rich’s The School Among the Ruins.” Peace & Nuclear Non-Proliferation: A World of No Nukes?: An Interdisciplinary Conference at Guilford College, February 16, 2013.


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