Carol Jenkins’ research focuses on literary expressions of sociopolitical developments, particularly in the first half of the nineteenth and early years of the twentieth centuries.
Jenkins earned her bachelor’s degree from Carleton College, and her master’s and doctorate from Washington University. Her doctoral research on Adalbert Stifter’s politics, their expression in his work, and how the political sensibilities of his critics influence(d) the understanding of them informs her work in all areas to this day. Having been employed previously as a teaching professor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, this work consisted largely of course development on topics as diverse as crime stories, sports and leisure, German social democracy, children’s literature, and the culture of the Weimar Republic, as well as the creation of a five-course language sequence using only open educational resources. In her teaching, Dr. Jenkins strives to awaken in her students the spirit of possibility inherent in discovering new worlds through language, texts, and other cultural documents, and to make the field of German language and literatures appealing to a more diverse body of students.