Jennifer W. Reiss

Jennifer W. Reiss is a Ph.D. candidate working on the North Atlantic in the long eighteenth century. She is particularly interested in women and gender, early modern medicine and disability, and British and early American legal history. Her dissertation project, provisionally titled Undone Bodies: Women and Disability in Early America, reconsiders how disability as a social category was constructed and experienced before burgeoning clinical understandings of bodily difference in the antebellum era. Thinking expansively about disability through the lens of womanhood, Undone Bodies brings legal, social, medical, labor, and political histories to bear on the interwoven relationship between gender and ability. It argues that femaleness was inherently disabling in Anglo-American society and thus, gender matters to the conception of impairment in the long eighteenth century. The project seeks to uncover hidden histories of disabled women, but also to question the gendered ways in which we imagine disability in the past.

Jenny’s research is being supported by fellowships from the William Nelson Cromwell Foundation / American Society for Legal History, the American Philosophical Society, the American Antiquarian Society, the Library Company of Philadelphia, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the New England Regional Fellowship Consortium, and the Consortium for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine, as well as multiple competitive research awards and fellowships from Penn’s School of Arts and Sciences (SAS) and the University’s Provost’s Office. 

In addition to her research fellowships, Jenny is the recipient of a 2024-2025 Marguerite Bartlett Hamer Dissertation Fellowship at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies and a 2024-2025 Wolf Humanities Center Doctoral Fellowship. Her commitment to undergraduate teaching has also been recognized with an Inclusive & Equitable Teaching Fellowship from Penn’s Center for Excellence in Teaching, Learning & Innovation (CETLI) (2023-2024). 

An active participant in the Penn community, she has served as a SAS representative to the University’s Graduate and Professional Student Assembly (GAPSA) (2023-2024); the graduate representative on the Provost’s Committee on Distinguished Teaching Awards (2023); a graduate student representative on the University Council (2022-2023); a History representative to the SAS Graduate Student Government (SASgov) (2021-2023); the ABD (dissertating student) member on Clio (the History Department’s graduate student board) and chair of the Department’s Graduate Handbook Creation Committee (2022-2023); and as co-convener of the Department’s Graduate Colloquium (2021-2022).

Alongside her University and departmental service, she is currently the Managing Editor of All of Us, the blog of the Disability History Association and a member of the Early Career Scholars Committee at the Massachusetts Historical Society.

As an undergraduate, an internship in the Penn Archives led to her B.A. honors thesis, “The Schemes of Public Parties:” Provost Smith, Dr. Franklin and the Struggle for Control of the University of Pennsylvania, which questioned the University’s hagiographic elevation of Benjamin Franklin in light of evidence he worked to undermine the institution in its early years. Her M.Phil. dissertation, entitled “By My Own Experience:” Women, Medicine and Knowledge in the Eighteenth Century Anglo-Atlantic World, looked at eighteenth-century female-led domestic medical practice in the context of globalization, Enlightenment learning, and ideas of authority in the British Atlantic.

Jenny’s first research project in the Ph.D. program,“Pity That So Fine a Man Should Have Lost His Leg:” Gouverneur Morris and the Nuances of Physical Disability in Early America, attempted to understand how Morris, the early American statesman and diplomat, negotiated his multiple physical impairments alongside class and gender expectations in the early Republic. Her second project, Property, Propriety, and Publicity: A Different Look at Pope v. Curll (1741), which built on initial research she conducted as a J.D. / LL.M. student, excavated an early modern discourse of publicity rights (i.e. rights to one’s name, image and likeness) from eighteenth-century British copyright litigation. Property, Propriety, and Publicity placed as runner up in the 2023 Morris L. Cohen Essay Competition of the American Association of Law Libraries (Legal History and Rare Books Section). 

Jenny regularly presents her work at conferences and seminars, including those sponsored by, among others, the Organization of American Historians (which awarded her a 2024 Samuel and Marion Merrill Travel Grant), the American Society for Legal History (which awarded her a 2024 Martha Jones Fellowship to participate in its Student Research Colloquium), the Omohundro Institute for Early American History and Culture, the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, the Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife, the American Philosophical Society, the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, Temple University, the University of Cambridge, and at public history programming sponsored by the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. 

In August 2020 Penn Today interviewed her about her research on Gouverneur Morris, the complexities of impairment in the eighteenth century, and how she discovered American history. Jenny’s work has also been featured in the Washington Post, on Gender Jawn, the podcast of Penn’s Center for Research in Feminist, Queer, and Transgender Studies, and on The Object of History, the podcast of the Massachusetts Historical Society. 

Prior to embarking on a career in history, Jenny practiced as an attorney in New York and London, including as an associate at the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at New York University School of Law, where she supervised students in NYU Law’s international human rights clinic, and worked on the Center’s initiatives on corporate human rights abuses and racial profiling. On a pro bono basis, she worked with a Council of Europe legal team on the reorganization of the European Court of Human Rights and has represented asylum seekers in both the U.S. and UK. A former supervising editor of the Harvard Journal on Legislation, she has published articles on human rights law, European law, and intellectual property law, and continues to maintain an interest in the history of human rights and the impact of law on art and culture.

Dissertation Committee: Professors Kathleen M. Brown (primary advisor), Sarah L.H. Gronningsater, Beth Linker (Department of History and Sociology of Science)

Exam Fields:

• North American History to 1820 (Daniel K. Richter)
• Gender Theories and Early American Gender and Sexuality (Kathleen M. Brown)
• History of Anglo-American Law to 1877 (Sarah L.H. Gronningsater)
• Histories of Disability and Medicine (Beth Linker, Department of History and Sociology of Science)