Jeanie Tietjen

Dr. Jeanie Tietjen is Professor of English at MassBay Community College, and founded and directs the Institute for Trauma, Adversity, and Resilience in Higher Education.  The Institute promotes an understanding of the profound impact trauma and adversity have on academic resilience in higher education as well as how a strengths-based, trauma-informed campus and community support student success. She served on an 18-month consensus study “Supporting the Whole Student: Mental Health and Well-Being in Higher Education” with Washington D.C.’s National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, and contributed an article “Naming the Urgency: The Importance of Trauma-Informed Practices in Community Colleges” in the November 2022 edited collection on Trauma Informed Pedagogies: A Guide for Responding to Crisis and Inequality in Higher Education.  She earned her doctorate from the Department of English at Brandeis University in 2016, and her dissertation examined representations of excremental violence in Holocaust literature. She has taught for over 20 years in diverse settings: two- and four-year colleges, prisons and homeless shelters, residential treatment facility for adolescent girls.