Overview
Dr. Jean Griffith serves as an associate professor in the department of English and as the associate dean for diversity, equity, and inclusion in the Fairmount College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. In her role as associate dean, she oversees faculty serving as best-practice advocates on faculty hiring committees; works with departments to infuse more diversity within the curriculum; helps departments develop and maintain inclusive cultures; and, most importantly, consults with and supports departments and faculty on diversity-related initiatives.
Dr. Griffith teaches courses in American, ethnic and women’s literature. Her current research project, tentatively titled Imagining Orphans: Poverty, Difference, and America’s Dispossessed Children, examines the riff between the stories we tell about orphans and the real history of children placed in institutions or with non-birth families. She has published essays in the volumes New Essays on Welty, Class, and Race and Eudora Welty, Whiteness, and Race and in journals such as Studies in the Novel and Western American Literature. Her first book, The Color of Democracy in Women’s Regional Writing, was published by The University of Alabama Press in 2009.