Jess Libow is Interim Director of the Writing Program and Visiting Assistant Professor at Haverford College, where she teaches courses on health and activism in U.S. literature and culture. She earned her Ph.D. in English with a certificate in women’s, gender, and sexuality studies from Emory University in 2021.

Her first book, Vigorous Reforms: Women Writers and the Politics of Health in the Nineteenth-Century United States (forthcoming from UNC Press), traces how women writers leveraged their expertise in the domestic health science of physical education to intervene in debates about sex, race, and citizenship. She is currently at work on her second book, which examines the intersections of health and visual culture in nineteenth-century literature. Her scholarship has been published or is forthcoming in American Literature, Literature and Medicine, the Journal of Medical Humanities, J19, ESQ, Legacy, College Composition and Communication, and the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies. She has also published review essays in venues including the Los Angeles Review of Books, Public Books, and the medical journal The Lancet.

Her research has been supported by grants from the American Antiquarian Society; the Library Company of Philadelphia and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania; the William L. Clements Library at the University of Michigan; the College of Physicians of Philadelphia; the Consortium for History of Science, Technology, and Medicine; and the Center for Mark Twain Studies.