Breidenbaugh Hall
Room 301A
300 North Washington St.
Gettysburg, PA 17325-1400
Education
PhD University of California, Berkeley
BA University of Texas at Austin
Academic Focus
Nineteenth-Century British Literature
Courses Taught
While women of the nineteenth century were commonly confined to the domestic sphere, vast swathes of the globe were also ruled by the most powerful queen of the modern era. This class explores paradoxes of gender in the age of early feminism, from the “angel in the house” to the “madwoman in the attic” and the fallen woman to the New Woman. While gender is our primary focus, we will also ask how nineteenth-century constructions of femininity intersected with contemporaneous questions of race, class, and sexuality. Featured authors hail from around the English-speaking world, from famous figures like Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, and Harriet Beecher Stowe to long-neglected writers like Frances Harper, Toru Dutt, and Zitkála-Šá. Counts toward ENG pre-1900 requirement.
Is reading children’s literature work or play? From novels as distinct as The Governess; or The Little Female Academy (1749) and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) to Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (1997) and The Hate U Give (2017), the genre has long navigated the poles of education and entertainment, socializing children alternately as miniature adults, docile innocents, or imaginative rebels. After spending the semester surveying didactic primers, fairytale fantasies, beloved classics, and curious outliers from the Golden Age of children’s literature, we’ll end by asking how modern YA fiction upholds or subverts earlier ideals of childhood. Along the way, we will analyze the social, historical, and pedagogical contexts of our objects of study and ponder the surprisingly large philosophical, psychological, and aesthetic questions raised by these seemingly small texts.
For centuries, writers have grappled with a surprisingly thorny task: how to capture ordinary experience in art. Adopting a “realist” approach to life and literature, they ask: How should we represent reality? What counts as “ordinary?” Whose perspectives are portrayed? This course explores novels, poetry, and visual art that seek to hold a mirror to the world and ends by considering realism’s curious tenacity in modern genres like cinematic neorealism, documentaries, sitcoms, reality TV, and social media. Fulfills Conceptualizing Diversity and Humanities.
Audiences were divided between rapture and revulsion when three previously unknown sisters—Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë—began to publish wildly popular novels in mid-nineteenth-century Britain. Ever since, their works have remained current through a constant stream of (re)adaptations. How have the Brontë sisters stayed so popular? How did these young women engage with the social problems of their era? Alongside a selection of novels, we will read a variety of poems, childhood writings, and reviews.
The function of a university, argued W. E. B. Du Bois in 1903, is “to be the organ of that fine adjustment between real life and the growing knowledge of life, an adjustment which forms the secret of civilization.” How did that ideal arise, and does it hold true today? Popular culture imagines the college campus alternately as an idyllic bubble, the wellspring of groundbreaking research, a site of vigorous debate, and more. Academia is often juxtaposed to the so-called “real world”—except when it is seen as a place to immerse oneself in life’s most vital questions. This course will ask how these diverse visions of the university are intertwined with its historical emergence and contemporary role in society. How have the missions of higher education changed over time? What critical issues confront universities today? And do depictions of college life in fiction and film resonate or jar with your own experiences this fall?