User:Mark K. Jensen

I live in Tacoma, Washington. Photograph available. [1] I was born on August 13, 1951, in Bethesda, Maryland. I am married and have one son. E-mail: jensenmk@plu.edu

My areas of specialization as a faculty member at Pacific Lutheran University, where I taught from 1989 to 2016, were 19th-century French literature and French. I taught 18th-century and 20th-century French literature as well, as well as modern European literature generally. More broadly, I majored in history at Princeton University and am interested in modern European and American history, with additional interests in world history, the philosophy of history, and the history of ideas.

After briefly studying law, I pursued literary interests while working in a San Francisco bookstore and decided to return to graduate school in 1980. I hold a Ph.D. in French literature from the University of California, Berkeley. I find the Wikimedia projects interesting from every point of view.

In later years I became politically active in the peace movement at the local level, and was involved in several groups in Pierce County, Washington. This led me to develop new interests: national security, 20th-century U.S. history, media studies, etc.

I am fluent in French and am an experienced translator from French to English with have a particular interest in translating the work of the French literary historian and critic Paul Bénichou (1908-2001). I have published a translation of Bénichou's Le Sacre de l'écrivain (1973) entitled The Consecration of the Writer, 1750-1830 (U. Nebraska, 1999), and have finished a yet-to-be-published translation of Le Temps des prophètes (1977).