Staff Writer, The Faculty
The Chronicle of Higher Education
Expertise: Academic publishing | University presses | e-books and journals | Scholarly communication | Libraries, archives, and archival preservation | Humanities research | Digital humanities | Intellectual property, copyright, and fair use, including Google Book Search
Background: Jennifer Howard, who joined The Chronicle of Higher Education in 2005, covers the fast-changing world of scholarly publishing and communication, particularly news involving the humanities, libraries, and archives.
Howard’s coverage of scholarly publishing and her reports on cutting-edge work in the humanities are regularly linked to and cited by mainstream news outlets, Web sites such as Arts & Letters Daily, and scholarly blogs and e-mail lists. An article for The Chronicle Review on fairy-tale scholarship provoked follow-up coverage in The New York Times and The Guardian. Other articles by Howard that have been widely cited include those on a historian’s search for the real John Henry; a wave of new Aeneid translations, including the first by a woman; how scholars are adapting Google Earth to the study of literary history; a marathon reading of Milton’s Paradise Lost at a small Minnesota college; and how an English professor reconstructed Mary Shelley’s original draft of Frankenstein.
Before coming to The Chronicle, Howard worked as a contributing editor for The Washington Post's Book World section, where she assigned, edited, and wrote reviews (1995 to 2005). Before that, she was on staff at the New York Review of Books and the Wilson Quarterly. Her essays and articles have appeared in Slate, Bookforum, the Boston Review, and the Washington Post's Outlook section, among other publications. She has a master’s degree in English from the University of Virginia and a bachelor’s in history from Princeton University. She lives on Capitol Hill with her husband, the writer Mark Trainer, and their two children.
Publications: Howard has published fiction in the Virginia Quarterly Review, the Blue Moon Review, and in the anthology D.C. Noir (Akashic Books). She is also a frequent guest blogger for the literary Web site Bookslut.
Online features: Howard is a regular contributor to The Chronicle's Wired Campus blog and news blog. She has also done multimedia features, including a podcast on Google Book Search and a video about the Paradise Lost marathon.
