What Matters to Me & Why - Jennifer Summit

The purpose of What Matters to Me and Why is to encourage reflection within the Stanford community on matters of personal values, beliefs, and motivations in order to better understand the lives and inspirations of those who shape the University.

Jennifer Summit (Professor of English) researches and teaches topics related to reading and literacy in the Middle Ages and Renaissance and today. With colleagues from UC Berkeley, UC Santa Cruz, and Mills College, she leads a research group called “What is a Reader?” that investigates the reading practices of current undergraduate students and considers their implications for the future of post-secondary education in literature and the humanities more broadly (http://whatisareader.stanford.edu/). The author of Lost Property: The Woman Writer and English Literary History, 1380-1589 (Chicago, 2000) and Memory’s Library: Medieval Books in Early Modern England (Chicago, 2008), she has received fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies and National Endowment for the Humanities and holds Stanford’s Eleanor Loring Ritch University Fellowship in Undergraduate Education. She spent 2012-13 at San José State University as an A.C.E. (American Council of Education) Fellow, where she learned about changes and challenges in undergraduate education today.

The entire 2013-2014 lineup is as follows:
Oct. 9 Ron Albucher
Nov. 13 Bernard Muir
Jan. 8 Yvonne Maldonado
Feb. 12 Dave Evans
Apr. 9 Jennifer Summit
May 14 Jeff Chang