Jennifer Jahner
Jennifer Jahner
Professor of English; Dean of Undergraduate Studies
Profile
Jennifer Jahner's research spans the histories of rhetoric, law, and science, focusing, in particular, on the European Middle Ages and its role in shaping our still-evolving understanding of rights, evidence, perception, and proof. Her research and teaching interests also include manuscript studies, visual culture, and gender and sexuality studies.
Jahner's first book, Literature and Law in the Era of Magna Carta (Oxford University Press, 2019) examines the grammatical and rhetorical training that informed constitutional thought in England at the beginnings of statutory law. It explores how poetry, which stood at the foundations of literate education in the Middle Ages, offered to law and its practitioners a powerful set of tools for conjuring theories of community, belonging, obligation, and injury. The book shows how the theory and practice of constitutionalism, articulated in legal codes and literature alike, emerged in tandem with the anti-Jewish laws and practices that would culminate in the 1290 expulsion of Jews from England.
Her current book project, Conjecture: A Premodern History, explores how classical and medieval thinkers developed concepts of predictability and plausibility through early practices in aggregating large and complex bodies of evidence, celestial and terrestrial.
Jahner has authored and edited a wide range of articles, volumes, and special issues. With Jessica Rosenberg, she co-edited a special issue of the journal postmedieval, on "Technique: Alternate Histories of Expertise and Experiment" (November 2025). With Emily Steiner and Elizabeth Tyler, Jahner co-edited Medieval Historical Writing: Britain and Ireland, 500–1500 (Cambridge University Press, 2019). She is also co-editor, with Ingrid Nelson, of Gender, Poetry, and the Form of Thought: Essays in Honor of Elizabeth A. Robertson (Lehigh University Press, 2022). At Caltech, Jahner teaches in the Integrated Core, alongside offering classes in the history of gender and sexuality, Chaucer, romance, contemporary poetry and justice, and the literature the marvelous and monstrous.
- Fletcher Jones Foundation Distinguished Fellow in British History and Culture, Huntington Library, 2023–2024
- Outstanding Graduate Teaching Award, Caltech Graduate Student Council, 2023
- Caltech Humanities and Social Sciences Brass Division Award for Service, 2022
- American Council of Learned Societies Fellow, 2019–2020
- Graves/ACLS Award in the Humanities, 2018–2019
- Borchard Foundation Grant, 2018
- Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences Brass Award for Teaching, 2015–2016
- Associated Students of Caltech (ASCIT) Teaching Award, 2012–2013
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Selected Publications
- "Cecily Champaigne Cries Quits: Chaucer, Quitclaims and Compromise," Chaucer Review 61 (2026): 378–395.
- "Sir John Fortescue and the Making of English Policy Prose Style," Oxford Handbook of Middle English Prose, eds. Sebastian Sobecki and Emily Steiner (forthcoming, Oxford University Press)
- "Felony, Fact-Finding, and Medieval Due Process," Modern Criminal Law Review (2025).
- "Unsettling the Half-Acre: Piers Plowman and the Making of Modern California," Yearbook of Langland Studies 38 (2024): 243–262.
- "Theories of Justice," Elgar Concise Encyclopedia of Law & Literature, eds. Robert Spoo and Simon Stern (Elgar, 2024)
- "Apocalypse Unfurled: Origins and End Times in the Genealogical Roll," Jay Rubenstein and Robert Bast, eds., Apocalyptic Cultures in Medieval and Renaissance Europe (Turnhout: Brepols, 2024)
- With John Tolan, "Violence, Letters, and the Law: Jewish-Christian Interaction and Episcopal Sanction in Thirteenth-Century England" Global Intellectual History 8 (2023)
- "Prediction, Prognosis, and the Efficacious Book," Poets and Scribes in Late Medieval England: Essays on Manuscripts and Meaning in Honor of Susanna Fein, ed. Michael Johnston and Kathryn Kerby-Fulton (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2023)
- Multiple Entries, in ed. Richard Newhauser, Vincent Gillespie, Jessica Rosenfeld, and Katie Walter, The Chaucer Encyclopedia (New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2022)
- Gender, Poetry, and the Form of Thought: Essays in Honor of Elizabeth A. Robertson (Lehigh University Press, 2022)
- "Literary Therapeutics: Experimental Knowledge in MS Digby 86," in ed. Susanna Fein, Manuscript Digby 86: Devotion, Science, and Literary Diversions for a Worcestershire Household c. 1280 (York Medieval Press, 2019)
- Literature and Law in the Era of Magna Carta (Oxford University Press, 2019)
- Medieval Historical Writing in Britain and Ireland, 500–1550, co-edited with Emily Steiner and Elizabeth Tyler (Cambridge University Press, 2019)
- "Literary Therapeutics: Experimental Knowledge in MS Digby 86," in ed. Susanna Fein, Manuscript Digby 86: Devotion, Science, and Literary Diversions for a Worcestershire Household c. 1280 (York Medieval Press, forthcoming)
- "Chaucer's Aesthetic Resources: Nature, Longing, and Economies of Form," in ed. Thomas Prendergast and Jessica Rosenfeld, Chaucer and the Subversion of Form (Cambridge UP, 2018), pp. 38–60.
- "Verse Diplomacy and the English Interdict," Thirteenth Century England 15 (2015): 99–114.
- "Reading for the End: Prescriptive Writing and the Practice of Genre," Exemplaria 27 (2015): 18–27.
- "The Mirror of Justices and the Art of Archival Invention," Viator 45 (2014): 221–46.