Rate My Professor Jess Libow

Jess Libow serves as Visiting Assistant Professor and Interim Director of the Writing Program at Haverford College, where she teaches writing and health humanities courses. She holds a Ph.D. in English with a certificate in women’s, gender, and sexuality studies from Emory University, completed in 2021. A 2016 graduate of Haverford College with a major in English, Libow's research and teaching focus on health humanities, women writers and the politics of health in the nineteenth-century United States, feminism before suffrage, disability studies, composition, and the politics of self-care.

Libow's first monograph, Vigorous Reforms: Women Writers and the Politics of Health in the Nineteenth-Century United States, is forthcoming from the University of North Carolina Press in 2025. Her peer-reviewed scholarship includes the prize-winning essay “A Face of Anguish: Pain and Portraiture in the Civil War Hospital,” published in American Literature 96.2 (2024) and awarded the Norman Foerster Prize for the best essay published annually in the journal. Other key publications are “Bringing Traditional Medicine into the Health Humanities Classroom with Kali Fajardo-Anstine’s ‘Remedies’” (with Lindsey Grubbs) in Journal of Medical Humanities (2024); “Fugitive Care: Harriet Jacobs and the Politics of Domestic Science” in J19 10.2 (2022); “Margaret Fuller’s Physical Education” in Legacy 39.1 (2022); “We uncertain step: Emily Dickinson, Disability, and Embodied Learning” in ESQ 68.3 (2022); “Writing Towards Access: Collaboration and Community” in College Composition and Communication 73.4 (2022); and “Prosthesis Repurposed: Gender and Rehabilitation in Flannery O’Connor’s Fiction” in Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies 11.4 (2017). Libow has also published essays and reviews in Public Books, Los Angeles Review of Books, Chicago Review of Books, and The Lancet.