A former Marshall Scholar, Jefferson Hunter has held fellowships from the National Humanities Center and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and at Smith taught courses in modern British literature and film, with occasional excursions into earlier periods.

In addition to writing articles and reviews, Hunter has published Edwardian Fiction (1983), Image and Word: The Interaction of Twentieth-Century Photographs and Texts (1987), How to Read Ulysses, and Why (2002), and English Filming, English Writing (2010). He is the film critic of the Hopkins Review. His current projects include teaching an online course on film technique and writing about unusual words and phrases on the website A Word in Your Ear.