Stanford Humanities Center
Jessica Jordan is a PhD candidate in English at Stanford University. Her dissertation, Anxieties of Abundance: Book and Body in America’s Gilded Age, explores how the late nineteenth century “book flood” heightened the already-troubled sense that books were people with minds (and bodies) of their own. She is a winner of the Honey & Wax Prize, an award which recognizes an outstanding book collection put together by a woman under 30; the California Young Book Collector’s Award; Stanford’s Wreden Prize for Book Collecting; and of the National Collegiate Book Collecting Contest.
SHC Project
Anxieties of Abundance: Book and Body in America's Gilded Age
In the late nineteenth century, Americans were drowning in books. Revolutions in printing and transportation technologies, reduced manufacturing costs, and a rabid reading public all coalesced to overwhelm the market with books of all kinds. Since what Americans read was believed to be a cipher for who Americans were, the task of choosing from among these varied offerings was a fraught one, made more complex by an ever-diversifying audience of readers. Jordan's research considers these unprecedented conditions of production, exploring how the “flood of books” proliferating throughout American space created new possibilities for how people made meaning from them, and what these new possibilities meant for the burgeoning literary culture of the United States.
“The Alice N. Hays Notebook: A Tour of Early Twentieth-Century Library
Methods in the UK and Europe,” in Electronic British Library Journal
“Five Young Women With Prize-Winning Book Collections,” The Paris Review, 2018
“Jessica C. Jordan Wins California Young Book Collector’s Prize,” Fine Books & Collections, 2021
“Six Decades of Leo and Diane Dillon,” Winning Wreden Entry, 2021
