Rate My Professor Jen Shelton

Dr. Jen Shelton serves as Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of English and as Associate Professor at Texas Tech University, where she has taught for twenty-five years. Her academic background includes a Ph.D. from Vanderbilt University. Shelton specializes in modern British literature, with particular attention to British and American modernism, children's literature, and topics related to World War I. She has published essays examining incest as a narrative structure in the works of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Vladimir Nabokov.

Shelton's major publication is the book Joyce and the Narrative Structure of Incest, part of the James Joyce Series from University Press of Florida in 2006. Her articles include "'Don't say such foolish things, dear': Speaking Incest in The Voyage Out" in Incest and the Literary Imagination (2002), "'The Word is Incest': Sexual and Linguistic Coercion in Lolita" in Textual Practice (1999), "Issy's Footnote: Disruptive Narrative and the Discursive Structure of Incest in Finnegans Wake" in ELH (1999), "Bad Girls: Gerty, Cissy, and the Erotics of Unruly Speech" in James Joyce Quarterly (1996-1997), and a co-authored piece "What is the Subject? Speaking, Silencing, (Self) Censorship" in Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature (1995). She is a member of the Teaching Academy. Shelton is currently developing a second book titled Play, Games, and Contest from Children's Books to Modernism, which explores writers' use of children's voices and literature written for children as sources of modernism's playfulness, including chapters on Lewis Carroll, E. Nesbit, and James Joyce, with a focus on power relations in narrative.