Jennifer Terry papers (MS.2024.015)

Biographical/Historical Note

Jennifer Terry is Professor Emeritus of Women's Studies/Gender & Sexuality Studies at the University of California at Irvine. Her scholarship concentrates on feminist cultural studies; science and technology studies; comparative and historical formations of gender, race, and sexuality; critical approaches to modernity; state-sponsored violence and biomedicine; and American studies in transnational perspective. She taught at Ohio State University from 1993-2001, University of California Berkeley from 2001-2002, Columbia University during 2014, and University of California at Irvine from 2003-2024. She received her PhD in History of Consciousness from University of California, Santa Cruz. Terry was a postdoctoral Fellow at the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women at Brown University from 1991-1992.

Terry's books include An American Obsession: Science, Medicine, and Homosexuality in Modern Society (University of Chicago Press, 1999), Deviant Bodies: Critical Perspectives on Difference in Science and Popular Culture (Indiana University Press, 1995), Processed Lives: Gender and Technology in Everyday Life (Routledge, 1997), and Attachments to War: Biomedical Logics and Violence in Twenty-First-Century America (Duke 2017). She has written articles and chapters on reproductive politics, the history of sexual science in the United States, contemporary scientific approaches to the sex lives of animals, love of objects, signature injuries of war, and the relationship between war-making practices and entertainment. In 2008, Terry completed a three-year National Science Foundation collaborative project on Privacy, Identity, and Technology. She is widely recognized for her writing and academic contributions in the fields of cultural studies of medicine, science and technology studies, and formations of sexuality.