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English - Faculty & Staff

Jill Lamberton

  • Associate Professor of English
  • Special Assistant to the President for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

Photo of Lamberton, Jill


Jill Lamberton joined the Wabash College faculty in 2009 and is Associate Professor of English. In 2018, she was appointed Senior Associate Dean of the College, and became Special Assistant to the President for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in 2021.  

A specialist in the teaching of writing and in 19th-century British literature, Prof. Lamberton’s courses range from Audio Rhetoric to African American Literature to the Victorian novel. (You can listen to Prof. Lamberton's students discuss their work in the Audio Rhetoric course on this Wabash on My Mind podcast.) She is an Honorary Member of the Malcolm X Institute of Black Studies at Wabash and has also served on the Advisory Board of the MXIBS.

Prof. Lamberton’s research focuses on women’s rhetorical strategies for entering higher education in the nineteenth-century. She looks specifically at extra-curricular writing—including campus magazines, song lyrics, short fiction, letters, and diaries—to understand how students used writing to translate the cultures and expectations of elite universities like Cambridge and Harvard. One fruitful moment in this research was Prof. Lamberton’s rediscovery of diary kept in 1883-84 by Alice Longfellow (daughter of the famous poet) while Longfellow was studying at Newnham College, Cambridge, and simultaneously serving on the committee that founded Radcliffe College.  In a new research project, Prof. Lamberton considers sound studies and, in particular, the power of oratory and audio storytelling in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. She is researching the life of A. Maude Royden, an English activist and public speaker who had a popular BBC radio show in the 1930s.

Prof. Lamberton has lived in Italy and Spain and has joined Wabash students on immersion trips to Ireland and Italy. Such experiences have made her an advocate for study abroad and immersion learning. In her time off, Prof. Lamberton likes to read, cook for friends, spend time with her family, and travel. 


Education

Ph.D., English and Education (Rhetoric and Composition), University of Michigan, 2007

M.A., English, Western Washington University, 1998

B.A., English, Religion, and Spanish, Walla Walla College, 1996


Recent Course Offerings

ENG 101 – College Writing

ENG 109 – Literature in Translation: Dante's Divine Comedy

ENG 202 – Writing with Power and Grace

ENG 216 – Introduction to Shakespeare and Film

ENG 218 – British Literature 1800-1900

ENG 300 – The Victorian Novel and its American Reception

ENG 310 – Life Writing: Autobiography, Biography, Memoir

ENG 360 – African American Literature for Page and Stage

RHE 290 / ENG 210 – Audio Rhetoric and Creative Writing

Freshman Tutorial – “Get Up, Stand Up!”: American Civil Rights in Music, Text, and Film

Freshman Tutorial – One Helluva Hike: Lessonbs on How to Live from Dante's Divine Comedy


Recent Presentations

“Soundwriting in the Composition Classroom: Why and How,” Conference on College Composition and Communication, 2019

"Students’ Audio Essays, Access to Higher Education, and Our Shared Work of Retention," DePauw University, 2018

“Institutional Memory and Extracurricular Student Writing” Rhetoric Society of America—Purdue Chapter, Purdue University, March 5, 2015

“Sound Studies, Radio Broadcast, and Maude Royden’s Pastoral Voice,” Conference on College Composition and Communication, 2014

“Nineteenth-century Educational Travel Writing: Early Global Feminism?” Feminisms and Rhetorics 9th Biennial Conference, 2013

“‘The lamp in the spine does not light on beef and prunes’: Virginia Woolf on Privileged Dining and Intellectual Work,” Modern Languages Association Annual Convention, International Virginia Woolf Society Session, 2007


Recent Publications

"Engaging and Amplifying Community Voices: An Interview Assignment Sequence" in Amplifying Soundwriting: Theory and Practice in Rhetoric and Writing, Eds. Stedman, Danforth & Faris, under review at University of Michigan Press.

Public Speaking and Democratic Participation: Speaking, Listening, and Deliberating in the Civic Realm, Jennifer Abbott, Todd McDorman, David Timmerman, and Jill Lamberton, Oxford University Press, 2015.

“‘A revelation and a delight’: Nineteenth-century Cambridge Women, Academic Collaboration, and the Cultural Work of Student Writing,” College Composition and Communication 65.4 (June 2014): 560-87.

“Out Loud: The Common Language of Poetry,” Lindsay Ellis, Anne Ruggles Gere, and Jill Lamberton, English Journal 93.1 (September 2003) 44-49.


Honors & Awards

The Gladstone Scholarship, Gladstone’s Library (formerly St. Deiniol’s Library), Hawarden, Wales, 2011

Distinguished Dissertation Award, American Society for the History of Rhetoric, 2008

Schlesinger Library Dissertation Grant, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, 2005

Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award, Rackham School of Graduate Studies, University of Michigan, 2005

David and Linda Moscow Prize for Excellence in Teaching Composition, Department of English Language and Literature, University of Michigan, 2005

Korzenik Research Fellowship, Friends of the Longfellow National Historic Site, Cambridge, MA, 2004


Et Cetera

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