Jennifer Tucker is a professor of history at Wesleyan University and the founding director of Wesleyan’s Center for the Study of Guns and Society, established in 2022 as a hub for pioneering interdisciplinary research, teaching, and annual conferences on firearms history.

Tucker is an expert on the history of firearms, technology, law, violence, and culture. Her research explores the history of firearms as industrial, commercial products, as well as the history of firearms engineering, design, and ballistics lethality. She also conducts historical research on the labor, manufacturing, and environmental impacts of firearms manufacture; state gun regulations in the 18^th and 19^th centuries; and global gun violence, public health, and policy.

Tucker coedited the book, A Right to Bear Arms? The Contested Role of History in Contemporary Debates on the Second Amendment (Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press, 2017), which has been cited in amicus briefs and Supreme Court opinions. She has written widely in academic and media outlets, including CNN, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Conversation, and MSNBC, about current debates over the history of the Second Amendment.

She engages nationally and internationally with museum professionals on gun-history related public history projects and is a member of the American Historical Association and National Council on Public History. She is a former Marshall Scholar, Fulbright Senior Scholar in the UK, and a senior research associate at the Science Museum in London, and her research has been recognized and supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Mellon Foundation, and the Social Science Research Council.