| PhD | New York University |
| MA | New York University |
| BA | University of Colorado, Boulder |
Allison Pease is Interim Provost and Vice President of Academic Affairs. Before serving as Interim Provost, Dr. Pease served as Associate Provost for Institutional Effectiveness, Associate to the Provost for Faculty, Interim Dean of Undergraduate Studies, Chair of English, and Director of Gender Studies. She is passionate about John Jay as a place of opportunity and transformation for students, faculty, and staff. Among her accomplishments at John Jay she led the creation of the English B.A. and the Gender Studies B.A., established sophomore advising in the majors, helped create CUNY’s first ACE program at John Jay, established the college’s Teaching and Learning Center, co-authored the 2019 Vision for Undergraduate Student Success, led the 2020-2025 Strategic Planning process, co-lead the initiative to create the Seven Principles for a Culturally Responsive, Inclusive and Anti-Racist Curriculum, and is currently leading John Jay’s Middle States reaccreditation process.
Interim Provost Pease earned her Ph.D. from New York University and joined John Jay in 1998. She holds the rank of Professor of English. She is a scholar of modernist literature and culture (1870-1940) and the author of Modernism, Mass Culture, and the Aesthetics of Obscenity (Cambridge UP, 2000), Modernism, Feminism, and the Culture of Boredom (Cambridge UP, 2012), the coauthor of Modernism, Sex, and Gender (Bloomsbury 2018) and the editor of the Cambridge Companion to To the Lighthouse (Cambridge UP, 2014). Her body of work questions the center from the margins whether through the lens of how the new genre of written pornography in the eighteenth-century challenged burgeoning aesthetic theories, and therefore elite class values; how women's boredom in the twentieth-century challenged the patriarchal status quo; or how theories of marginalized sexual and gender identities have reshaped modernist studies.
Literature Courses: African-American Poetry, Justice by the Book, Selfhood and Modernity, Black Futures (Honors Thesis), Masculinities after Feminism (Honors Thesis), Lesbian Literature of the Twentieth Century, Modernity and Consciousness (graduate seminar), Twentieth-Century Literature, Twentieth-Century American Literature and Alcohol (McNair Thesis), Modern Japanese Fiction (resulting in one Honors thesis), Post-Colonial Indian Literature and Theory (resulting in two Honors theses), Introduction to Literary Studies, Text and Context: African Colonial and Post-Colonial Literature, The Idea of the Heroine, Gender in Literature, New Fiction, The Literature of Crime and Punishment, American Literature, Modern European and Post-Colonial Literature, The Nineteenth-Century Novel: London and the Urban Experience, Literature of the Industrial Revolution, Literary Interpretation.
Interdisciplinary, Gender Studies, and Humanities Courses: Introduction to Gender Studies, Representations of Race and Ethnicity in the United States (PhD and undergraduate level), The Idea of the Heroine, Memory, Intellectual Heroes of the Twentieth Century, Love and Social Law, History of Sexual Attitudes in the United States, Heroes of our Time: Indigenous Political Reformers, Humanities IV: 1850-present, Humanities III: 1600-1850, New York as a Cultural Environment.
Writing Courses: English 101, Writing Workshop II, Writing Workshop I, Translating Experience into the Essay, Elements of Writing.
Modernist Studies Association
Modernism, Sex, and Gender. (with co-author Celia Marshik). London: Bloomsbury, 2018.
Editor. The Cambridge Companion to To The Lighthouse. Cambridge University Press, 2014.
Modernism, Feminism, and the Culture of Boredom. Cambridge University Press, 2012.
Modernism, Mass Culture, and the Aesthetics of Obscenity. Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Allison Pease is a scholar of modernist literature and culture (1890-1945). Her body of work questions the center from the margins whether through the lens of how pornography interrogates aesthetic, and therefore elite class values; how women's boredom challenges the patriarchal status quo; or how theories of marginalized sexual and gender identities have reshaped modernist studies. In her first book, Modernism, Mass Culture, and the Aesthetics of Obscenity, Pease traces the shared history and cultural politics of aesthetic theory and pornography from the late eighteenth- to the early twentieth century, demonstrating how sexually explicit representations come to be recognized as art in the twentieth century. In Modernism, Feminism, and the Culture of Boredom she argues that representations of women's boredom at a time when women were marching in the streets for the right to vote critiqued the constraints of women's lives, and their lack of access to the cultural privileges of individualism. Most recently in Modernism, Sex, and Gender, she and Celia Marshik show how second-wave feminist scholarship, queer theory, and African-American critiques have reshaped how modernism is read, taught, and understood.