English - Faculty & Staff

Jill Lamberton joined the Wabash College faculty in 2009 and is Associate Professor of English. In 2018, she was appointed Senior Associate Dean of the College, and became Special Assistant to the President for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in 2021.  

A specialist in the teaching of writing and in 19th-century British literature, Prof. Lamberton’s courses range from Audio Rhetoric to African American Literature to the Victorian novel. (You can listen to Prof. Lamberton's students discuss their work in the Audio Rhetoric course on this Wabash on My Mind podcast.) She is an Honorary Member of the Malcolm X Institute of Black Studies at Wabash and has also served on the Advisory Board of the MXIBS.

Prof. Lamberton’s research focuses on women’s rhetorical strategies for entering higher education in the nineteenth-century. She looks specifically at extra-curricular writing—including campus magazines, song lyrics, short fiction, letters, and diaries—to understand how students used writing to translate the cultures and expectations of elite universities like Cambridge and Harvard. One fruitful moment in this research was Prof. Lamberton’s rediscovery of diary kept in 1883-84 by Alice Longfellow (daughter of the famous poet) while Longfellow was studying at Newnham College, Cambridge, and simultaneously serving on the committee that founded Radcliffe College.  In a new research project, Prof. Lamberton considers sound studies and, in particular, the power of oratory and audio storytelling in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. She is researching the life of A. Maude Royden, an English activist and public speaker who had a popular BBC radio show in the 1930s.

Prof. Lamberton has lived in Italy and Spain and has joined Wabash students on immersion trips to Ireland and Italy. Such experiences have made her an advocate for study abroad and immersion learning. In her time off, Prof. Lamberton likes to read, cook for friends, spend time with her family, and travel.