Associate Professor of English
Co-ordinator, Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

Montgomery Hall 102b
x4233

from off campus:
240-895-4233

jcognard@smcm.edu

  Jennifer Cognard-Black received her B.A. in English and music from Nebraska Wesleyan University, her M.A. in creative writing from Iowa State University, and her Ph.D. from The Ohio State University in transatlantic 19th-century women’s literature. Dr. Cognard-Black’s specialty is nineteenth-century correspondences among Anglo-American women writers and, in particular, how these women wrote and thought about writing in an era of authorial professionalization; her books include Narrative in the Professional Age: Transatlantic Readings of Harriet Beecher Stowe, George Eliot, and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (Routledge 2004) and Kindred Hands: Letters on Writing by British and American Women Authors, 1865 – 1935 (Iowa Press 2006, co-edited with Elizabeth MacLeod Walls). Yet Dr. Cognard-Black’s interests span everything from the literatures of food, to the archetypal appeal of Garrison Keillor, to the rhetoric of silence in the work of novelist Gayl Jones, to composition theory and practice (her composition textbook, Advancing Rhetoric, appeared in 2006). In addition, Dr. Cognard-Black also publishes short fiction under the pseudonym J. Annie MacLeod; her writing has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and she’s currently working on her first novel.