Rate My Professor Jennifer Smith

Jennifer Smith, Professor of Spanish in the School of Languages and Linguistics at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, holds the position of Co-Interim Dean and Associate Dean for Budget, Personnel, and Research in the College of Liberal Arts. She earned her Ph.D. in Hispanic Literature from Indiana University. Since joining SIU in 2006 as an Assistant Professor, she has advanced through the ranks, serving previously as Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Languages, Cultures, and International Studies, and was promoted to full Professor in 2022. Her research centers on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Iberian literature and culture, particularly the interplay between medical discourses on gender and sexuality and their intersections with literary works. She also investigates intersections of race, class, gender, and nation. In the classroom, Smith teaches Spanish language courses as well as topics in Iberian, Latin American, and Latinx literature, cinema, and culture. Additionally, she directs the university's summer study abroad program in Alcalá de Henares, Spain.

Smith has published extensively on these themes, with a focus on the Spanish feminist author Emilia Pardo Bazán. Her authored monograph is Women, Mysticism, and Hysteria in Fin-de-Siècle Spain (Vanderbilt University Press, 2021). She has edited or co-edited key collections: Modern Spanish Women as Agents of Change: Essays in Honor of Maryellen Bieder (Bucknell University Press, 2018), Intersections of Race, Class, Gender, and Nation in Fin-de-Siècle Spanish Literature and Culture (Routledge, 2017, with Lisa Nalbone), and Emilia Pardo Bazán’s Insolación (Cervantes & Co., 2011). Notable articles include "La violencia de género en dos cuentos de Emilia Pardo Bazán" (2009), "Cultural Capital and Social Class in Emilia Pardo Bazán's La mujer española and Insolación" (2016), "The Wet Nurse and the Subversion of the Ángel del hogar in Medical and Literary Texts from Late Nineteenth-Century Spain" (2010), and "Women and the Deployment of Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century Spain" (2006). Over twenty such publications underscore her influence in reshaping understandings of gender dynamics and social constructs in nineteenth-century Spanish literature. Her administrative roles further demonstrate her commitment to fostering research and scholarship within the College of Liberal Arts.