Jennifer S. Tuttle

Jennifer S. Tuttle, Ph.D.

she/her
Dorothy M. Healy Professor of Literature and Health
Professor of English
Director, Maine Women Writers Collection
Affiliated Faculty, Gender, Women, & Sexuality Studies
Ludcke Chair of Liberal Arts and Sciences, 2021-22

Location

Marcil Hall 105
Biddeford Campus
Eligible for Student Opportunities

Jennifer Tuttle teaches courses on literature and health studies, US literature and culture, women's writing, and the US West. Holding an endowed chair in literature and health, she designs courses, pursues scholarship, and develops curricular and programming initiatives that integrate the health sciences and the humanities at UNE. As the Dorothy M. Healy Professor, she is also director of the Maine Women Writers Collection. She is also a co-founder of the Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies Program. Beyond UNE, she was a longtime editor of Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers.

Central to Dr. Tuttle's research is scholarship drawing on archival sources as well as the study of archives themselves. Much of her work engages in the recovery of texts, writers, and perspectives that are absent from or obscured by the historical record. She is editor of the first recovered edition of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1911 western The Crux (2002) and co-editor of two additional books on Gilman, a collection of her letters (2009) and a volume of critical essays (2011). Dr. Tuttle has been at the forefront of recent scholarly efforts to illuminate the western orientation of New England-born Gilman. Her published essays on Gilman as well as on authors Dora L. Mitchell, Edith Maude Eaton, María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Owen Wister, and S. Weir Mitchell, M.D. explore intersections among race, gender, medical discourse, and western literary studies, and her article on Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's letters to Weir Mitchell illuminates issues of gender and professionalization in the late-19th-century doctor-patient dyad as well as the problem of women's invisibility in archives. Her current book project, Dora Mitchell/Dolores Michel: A Literary Biography, illuminates how one woman navigated early 20th-century California’s shifting and racialized terrain; enlarges what is considered to be Black literary women’s historical archive; and reconsiders where and how to look for Black women’s texts. 

Professor Tuttle is the recipient of myriad awards for her work as a scholar and teacher. These include her designation as the 2021-22 Ludcke Chair of Liberal Arts and Sciences for outstanding achievement as a scholar-teacher; Distinguished Alumna of the University of California, San Diego Department of Literature; the Kenneally Cup Award for Distinguished Academic Service to UNE; and the Schachterle Prize, awarded by the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts for the best new essay on literature and science (for “Rewriting the West Cure”), among others. She also has several award nominations, including for the Modern Language Association's  Morton N. Cohen Award for a Distinguished Edition of Letters (for The Selected Letters of Charlotte Perkins Gilman), for both the Debra J. Summers Memorial Award for Teaching Excellence (UNE/Biddeford Campus) and the Mary Rines Thompson Award for Teaching Excellence (UNE/Portland Campus), and for the ULead Excellence in Academic Advising Award.

As the faculty mentor for the UNE Generation Action Club (Planned Parenthood campus chapter), Professor Tuttle loves working with students both in and outside of class.

Courses

Writing, Revolution, and Resistance in US Literature (ENG 200)

Who and What is an American? Reimagining US Literature (ENG 201)

The Captivity Narrative (ENG 235)

Women of the West (ENG 237)

American Dystopias (ENG 237)

The Slave Narrative (ENG 300)

Writing and Women's Health (ENG 310)

Madness in Literature (ENG 326)

Patient Narratives (ENG 326)

Women’s Detective Fiction (ENG 335)

Humanities Seminar: Slavery in the Land of the Free (ENG 412)

Introduction to Women’s and Gender Studies (WGST 200)

Directed studies according to student interest

Credentials