Dr. Jessica Garcés Jensen

Dr. Jessica Garcés Jensen is Associate Professor of French and Graduate Program Director of the M.A in Second Language Acquisition, Policy, and Culture at the University of Southern Indiana.  She received her B.A. in French Studies from Brown University and her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania.

Her research explores contemporary French fiction centrally concerned with the autodiegetic narrator’s perception of that body during pregnancy, pregnancy loss, sterility, and menopause as well as when confronted with human reproductive cloning.  By revealing how contemporary French authors make use of this previously underexplored literary space, her work uncovers the diverse fictional manifestations of this body that engage with the twentieth century’s dramatic changes in birthing culture and the social, legal, and medical management of the female body, while revealing French women, modern medicine, and society’s conflicting perceptions of it.

Dr. Jensen is currently preparing her book manuscript, Hysterographies: Narratives of the Reproductive Body in Contemporary French Fiction. Her other research interests include 20^th & 21^st- century French and Francophone fiction, women writers of French and Francophone literature, French cinema, foreign language pedagogy, and the history of reproductive medicine in France. Her most recent publications appeared in the journals Neophilologus, Symposium and The French Review.

Before coming to USI in 2012, she served as Language Coordinator and lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania.

Dr. Jensen teaches all levels of French language, literature and culture from beginning to advanced French including courses on French women writers, Contemporary French film, and the French Novel.

In Fall 2023, Dr. Jensen was awarded French Teacher of the Year- Collegiate by the Indiana Chapter of the American Association of Teachers of French.