Since January 2003, Jennifer Terry has been an associate professor of Women’s Studies with formal affiliations in Anthropology, Comparative Literature, Film and Media Studies, the Art, Computation, and Engineering PhD Program, and the Critical Theory Institute at the University of California at Irvine. Her research is concentrated in Feminist Cultural Studies; Science and Technology studies; comparative and historical formations of gender, race, and sexuality; critical approaches to modernity; and American studies in transnational perspective. Professor Terry came to UCI after a decade of academic employment at UC Berkeley and Ohio State University. She received her PhD in History of Consciousness from UC Santa Cruz in 1992.
She is the author of An American Obsession: Science, Medicine, and Homosexuality in Modern Society (University of Chicago Press, 1999) and co-editor of Deviant Bodies: Critical Perspectives on Difference in Science and Popular Culture (Indiana University Press, 1995) and Processed Lives: Gender and Technology in Everyday Life (Routledge, 1997). She has written articles and chapters on reproductive politics, the history of sexual science in the United States, and contemporary scientific approaches to the sex lives of animals.
Terry is now working on a project presently titled Killer Entertainments: Militarism, Governmentality, and Consuming Desires in Transnational America. The project focuses on the history of military morale management in the US during the expansion of the nation into an international empire by theorizing the dynamics of governmentality and sentimentality as they manifest in the mutual provocations between entertainment forms, hygienic technologies, and militarism. The book’s chapters analyze military basic training and its framing of the U.S. nation through a praxis of “unit cohesion”; civilian mobilization for war; surveillance technologies and remote tracking devices; weaponry design and its relationship to medical innovations; psychological operations; USO shows; and simulation experiences. The technosocial processes analyzed share capacities for entertainment, aggression, and desire, and are tied to new forms of commodification and governmentality. A critical analysis of the erotic politics at play in these deployments is central to the project.
She is collaborating on a three-year National Science Foundation funded project on Privacy, Identity, and Technology, with Paul Dourish and Simon Cole. She is also a member of the Working Group on Transnational and Transoceanic Networks.
Terry is the coordinator of the Queer Studies program at UCI, and became the chair of Women’s Studies in July of 2005, following the directorship of Inderpal Grewal, and is a member of the faculty of the Culture and Theory PhD program.