Jennifer Summit


Jennifer Summit is an American scholar of Medieval and Renaissance English Literature and was a professor of English at Stanford University, where she was Chair of the English Department between 2008 and 2011. In 2013, Summit became Dean of Undergraduate Studies at San Francisco State University. Summit is currently the Provost at San Francisco State University.

History

A graduate of Los Altos High School, Summit received her BA from Vassar College in 1987, where she graduated with highest honors and Phi Beta Kappa. She was awarded a PhD by The Johns Hopkins University in 1995.
Summit joined the Stanford faculty in 1995 and was granted tenure in 2001. She became Dean of Undergraduate Education at San Francisco State University in 2014.
Summit's work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies and the Stanford Humanities Center. She received the Dean's Award for Distinguished Teaching in 1998.
Her most recent book, Action versus Contemplation: Why an Ancient Debate Still Matters, co-authored with Blakey Vermeule, was published in 2018, and was shortlisted for the Phi Beta Kappa Ralph Waldo Emerson Award. Memory's Library: Medieval Books in Early Modern England, was awarded the Roland H. Bainton Book Prize by the Sixteenth Century Society and Conference and the John Ben Snow Foundation Book Prize from the North American Conference on British Studies. Her first book, Lost Property: the Woman Writer and English Literary History, 1380-1589, was published in 2000.
Professor Summit's research interests bridge the medieval and early modern periods and focus on the histories of reading, literature, and knowledge, with a special interest in literacy and the disciplines today.
Summit is the daughter of Roger K. Summit, founder of Dialog Information Services and Virginia M. Summit, author and former mayor of Los Altos Hills, CA.

Published works