Dean Jennifer M. Jeffers

Jennifer M. Jeffers is Professor of English and Associate Dean of the College of Graduate Studies at Cleveland State University.  

In addition to numerous articles, Professor Jeffers is the author of Beckett’s Masculinity (Palgrave Macmillan, November 2009), Britain Colonized:  Hollywood’s Appropriation of British Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), The Irish Novel at the End of the Twentieth Century: Gender, Bodies, and Power (Palgrave Macmillan, 2002; paperback, 2008), Uncharted Space: The End of Narrative (2001), editor of Samuel Beckett (1998), and co-editor of Contextualizing Aesthetics: From Plato to Lyotard (1998).  

Professor Jeffers is General Editor for a Palgrave Macmillan series devoted to the work of Samuel Beckett. The goal of NEW INTERPRETATIONS OF BECKETT IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY is to stimulate new approaches and develop fresh perspectives on Beckett, his texts, and his legacy. The series will provide a forum for original and interdisciplinary interpretations concerning any aspect of Beckett’s work or his influence upon subsequent writers, artists, and thinkers.

“In 1991 I entered the PhD program in Comparative Literature planning to write my dissertation on Samuel Beckett’s work. I did not know when I came to Atlanta that the Correspondence of Samuel Beckett project was at Emory University. A few days before my first semester at Emory, I “discovered” the Beckett project and was ecstatic when they subsequently hired me as a Research Assistant. I worked as a Research Assistant for four years, up to the point of taking my first position in academia.

Without a doubt, working on the Beckett project deepened and broaden my research skills and knowledge, not only on Beckett, but Europe during the 1920s and 30s (I worked primarily on Volume I). Also, working on the Beckett project would later help me down the road when I conducted my own archival research at Trinity College Dublin, the University of Reading, and as Andrew Mellon Fellowship recipient at the Ransom Humanities Center at the University of Texas.”