Departmental affiliation: The Writing Center
My main role at the college is helping students develop as writers through one-on-one sessions and through a wide variety of workshops held in the Writing Center, as well as in classrooms, in support of First Year Seminars and other courses (by request). I also offer Writing Counseling, which helps students perform closer to their potential by improving their approaches and attitudes towards writing, as well as their management of time.
I seem to have circled back to Amherst College after a couple of decades as a student of literature and as a teacher of literature and writing, at institutions including Saint Lawrence University, Miss Porter's School, UC-Santa Cruz, the University of New Hampshire, and SUNY-Binghamton. My research has focused on issues of race, gender, and sexuality in early modern texts, from paintings of Queen Elizabeth I to anti-tobacco tracts to the works of Shakespeare. My dissertation examined early modern English notions of race through a focus on representations of “alien incorporations”—both taking in and being taken in by foreigners and/or foreign territory.
My literary scholarship is currently on hold, as I focus on teaching the art of the academic essay and on developing my skills as a Writing Counselor. I am especially interested in learning how best to help those who really struggle to get words on the page and how to advise students in managing their sometimes overwhelming reading loads. I have been wondering lately how many pages of different sorts of texts one "ought" to be able to read.