Jessica E. Teague, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
Biography
Jessica Teague specializes in 20th and 21st-century American Literature and is the author of Sound Recording Technology and American Literature, from the Phonograph to the Remix (Cambridge UP, 2021), which was shortlisted for the Modernist Studies Association first book prize and won the prestigious American Book Award (Walter & Lillian Lowenfels Award for Criticism). The intersections between literature, sound, and technology are the focus of her research. Her teaching, like her scholarship, is interdisciplinary and engages with modernism, sound studies, jazz and popular music, theatre and performance, media studies, and African American studies. Her work has been published in edited collections and journals such as American Quarterly, Sound Studies, SoundingOut!, Contemporary Literature, and MELUS. Dr. Teague has also been the recipient of research fellowships from the ACLS and the Harrison Institute at the University of Virginia. In 2022, she was awarded UNLV’s William Morris Award for Excellence in Scholarship. She received her Ph.D. in English from Columbia University (2013) and her BA from UCLA (2004).
Select Publications
Book
- Sound Recording Technology and American Literature, from the Phonograph to the Remix (Cambridge UP, 2021)
Articles and Chapters
- “A Story in Sound: The Unpublished Writings of Sidney Bechet.” MELUS, Winter 2023.
- “John Dos Passos and the Russian Theatre, 1928,” John Dos Passos’s Transatlantic Chronicling: Critical Essays on the Interwar Years, edited by Aaron Shaheen and Rosa Bautista-Cordero, University of Tennessee Press, 2022. p. 169-189.
- “Black Sonic Space and the Stereophonic Poetics of Amiri Baraka’s It’s Nation Time.” Sound Studies, vol. 1, no. 1, 2016, pp. 22-39.
- “The Recording Studio on Stage: Liveness in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” Sound Clash: Listening to American Studies, special issue of American Quarterly, edited by Kara Keeling and Josh Kun, vol. 63, no. 3, 2011, pp. 555-571.
Reviews and Web Publications
- “Black Sounds and Phonographic Poetry.” Contemporary Literature, vol. 62 no. 4, 2021, p. 590-596.
- “When Fiction Rocks!” Contemporary Literature, vol. 60 no. 2, 2019, pp. 282-288.
- “‘KASPLASH! SLURPLOP… KPLUNK!’ Charles Mingus’s Sound Effects and the Politics of Humor.” SoundingOut! 30 September 2019. Soundstudiesblog.com
Teaching
Graduate
- Modernist Theatre and Performance
- Sound, Music, and 20C American Literature
- Bibliography and Methods
Undergraduate
- What is a Book? The Materiality of Texts
- Jazz and American Literature, 1918–present
- Modern American Novel: 1919-1952
- Modern American Drama: Theatre and Performance 1920–present
- Introduction to Literary Theory and Criticism
- Survey of American Literature I, beginnings to 1865
- Survey of American Literature II, 1865 to present
- World Literature II, Enlightenment to present