A graduate of Los Altos High School (Los Altos, California), Professor Summit received her Bachelor from Vassar College in 1987 where she graduated with highest honors and Phi Beta Kappa. She was awarded a Doctor of Philosophy by The Johns Hopkins University in 1995.
Summit is the Dean of Undergraduate Studies at San Francisco State University. Summit joined the Stanford faculty in 1995 and was granted tenure in 2001. She became Dean of Undergraduate Education at San Francisco State University in 2014.
Summit"s work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies and the Stanford Humanities Center.
Her first book, Lost Property: the Woman Writer and English Literary, 1380-1589, was published in 2000. Professor Summit"s research interests bridge the medieval and early modern periods and focus on the histories of reading, literature, and knowledge, with a special interest in literacy and the disciplines today.
She received the Dean"s Award for Distinguished Teaching in 1998. Her most recent book, Memory"s Library: Medieval Books in Early Modern England (2008), was awarded the Roland H. Bainton Book Prize by the Sixteenth Century Society and Conference (SCSC) and the John Ben Snow Foundation Book Prize from the North American Conference on British Studies (NCBS). Summit is the daughter of Roger K. Summit, founder of Dialog Information Services and Virginia M. Summit, author and former mayor of Los Altos Hills, California.
