Jennifer Thomas

Jennifer Thomas, Associate Professor and Chair of Performance and Communication Arts

Hey…my name is Jen Thomas. I work in the Performance and Communications department and am a first-generation college student who “went all the way” (BA, MA, PhD). My family is all from southern Minnesota; my dad is a retired front-end loader for a quarry and my mom is a retired office administrator.

My college decision process was going where a friend was going. I had no idea how to apply for college or what college even meant, but I knew I still had more to learn. So, off I went to Concordia College (about 4.5 hours north of my home) to start my academic life. I started off as a pre-med, then English literature and secondary education, and then finally settled on studying theatre and English literature. At some point in my undergraduate career it dawned on me that being a professor was a job people could get, but I had no idea how that happened or what steps would get me there. I graduated in 1996 and moved to Seattle, Washington to work in theatre and see the world beyond Minnesota.

I worked for 7 years before finding my way back to graduate school. I carried my first-gen’ness into grad school as well. In my first graduate theory class, I remember sobbing over my homework because the words in my textbook weren’t in my dictionary (this was pre-internet) and I didn’t understand how I was supposed to learn the theory if I couldn’t even figure out what a word meant. Eventually I learned to spend a lot of time in study groups and office hours which helped my academic life, but also connected me to a peer group to use as resources. I graduated from the University of Oregon with my MA (2005) and PhD (2010) in Theatre.

As a first-generation college student, I have always been drawn to how people know what they know. In my undergraduate education, I was baffled by how folks around me understood higher education. It was foreign to me and felt like everyone around me knew a language I didn’t understand. I have tried to work as an educator to make sure that how I teach and what I teach is accessible to all students from an introductory course to an upper division course. Working together with students to build and understand the language of higher education.