Anika Jensen

I research and teach American literature from the mid-19th to the late 20th century with additional interests in women's literature, Modernism, affect theory, and the First World War. I taught English and writing at the University of Kentucky and the University of South Alabama. 

My experiences as an undergraduate at Gettysburg College have motivated me to incorporate issues of collective memory and historical commemoration into my teaching. I am currently working on my first book, which examines the affective dimension of relief work in American women’s writing of and about the First World War. I seek to explore how feeling and felt experiences inform anti-war and Civil Rights activism. My work on this subject has appeared in War, Literature, and the Arts and is forthcoming in the Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association and the Cambridge History of War and Society in America. 

I have never been able to shake my personal and academic interest in the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, and I have articles published and forthcoming in Tolkien Studies that examine gender and queerness in Tolkien’s legendarium.