Directory

Interdisciplinarity is at the heart of Jennie-Rebecca Falcetta’s teaching, writing, and scholarship. As a Humanities Institute Dissertation Fellow at the University of Connecticut, she focused her doctoral work on the conversation between avant-garde art and literary experimentation in the Modernist period.  She is also a graduate of Baylor University (M.A., English) and Gordon College (B.A., English). She spent a junior year abroad at York St. John University, where a course on interdisciplinary Modernism (and the electric experience of reading Ulysses for the first time) set her on a scholarly path.

Jennie-Rebecca’s wide-ranging interests have led to publications on the Grail Quest, modernist poetry, opera, Virginia Woolf, intergenerational teaching, and modern art.  Her work has appeared in the Journal of Modern Periodical Studies, Religion and Literature, the Journal of Modern Literature, and in several edited collections.

As an educator, Jennie-Rebecca prizes and prioritizes student’s curiosity.  She aims to support their work developing and flexing the muscles needed for critical, scholarly, research-based conversations about the questions, creative works, social issues, and contexts most important to them.  She has designed classes in Modernism, the cultural output surrounding the First World War, and the American musical theatre.  She loves best the moment when a student connects with a new poem, theory, novel, or idea that lights them up and helps them to see themselves, their practice, and the world with greater clarity. She strives to practice Paulo Freire’s concept of being a teacher-student engaged in “critical co-investigation” along with her student-teachers, and is grateful for how much they teach her, all of the time.

Jennie-Rebecca lives with her family on Boston’s North Shore.  When not in the classroom, she might be found singing, reading, or by the sea.

Industry Experience

Publications

Refereed articles

• 2019 – “Rising and Falling on the Price of Paper: The Story of Mandrake” Journal of Modern Periodical Studies 10.1-10.2: 157-183.
• 2014 – “Brideshead Illustrated: The Sacred and Profane Aesthetics of Capt. Charles Ryder” Religion & Literature 46.1, 53-76
• 2007 – “Geometries of Space and Time: The Cubist London of Mrs. Dalloway” Woolf Studies Annual 13, 111-136
• 2006 – “Acts of Containment: Marianne Moore, Joseph Cornell, and the Poetics of Enclosure” Journal of Modern Literature 29.4, 124-144
• 1997 – “The Enduring Sacred Strain: The Place of the Tale of the Sankgreal Within Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur” Christianity and Literature 47.1), 21-34.

Book Chapters

• Forthcoming 2021 – “The Visions of John Ball: Iain Bell’s Opera In Parenthesis.” Steen Bille Jørgensen, Margaret Higonnet, and Svend Erik Larsen, eds. Pathways through Realism (= Landscapes of Realism, vol. 2). Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2021
• 2013 – “‘That better part which shall not be taken from you’: Varieties of Christian Experience in Jane Eyre” in Critical Insights: Jane Eyre, ed. Katie R. Peel. Salem Press
• 2013 – “Let X=Professor; Now Solve for Y. Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Millennials” in Generation X Professors Speak: Voices From Academia, ed. Marc Shaw, John Kille, and Elwood Watson. Scarecrow Press. [Featured on Salon.com as the cover article of 25 May 2013]
• 2010 – “Don’t Judge a Cover by its Woolf: Book Jacket Images and the Marketing of Virginia Woolf’s Work” in Virginia Woolf and the Literary Marketplace, ed. Jeanne Dubino. Palgrave.

Reviews

• 2002 – “She Moves Through the Boom” by Anne Marie Hourihane New Hibernia Review 6.4 (Winter 2002), 155-157
• 2002 – “Reading Roddy Doyle” by Caramine White New Hibernia Review 6.1 (Spring 2002), 148-149

Notes

• 2001 – “Seamus Alchemicus: Gold and Transmutation in Seamus Heaney’s Early Poems” Notes on Modern Irish Literature 13 (2001), 14-21

Fellowships

• 2017 – MassArt Kelner Faculty Fellowship
• 2006-2007 – University of Connecticut Humanities Institute Dissertation Fellowship

Professional Affiliations and Organizations

• Northeast Modern Language Association
• The David Jones Society

Photo by Mary Lou Roy Photography