Acting Head and Assistant Professor of English

• PhD in English, University of Oregon (American and   Environmental Literatures)
• Graduate Certificate in Gender Studies, University of Oregon
• MA in English, University of Oregon
• BA in English, California State University, with honors

Personal Statement:

I came to NSU in 2006 after teaching at the University of Oregon and the University of Alaska Southeast, although another way to put that is to say that I traveled from the mountainous landscape of the Willamette Valley, Oregon, to the glacier's edge in Juneau, Alaska, to settle in the cypress groves and pine forests of Louisiana. I have enjoyed the varied beauty of the landscapes where I have lived, and I hope to enable my students to experience place in a new way for themselves as they discover their passions for learning about literature. My research speaks to my interests in landscape and environments, as my work in critical animal studies and ecocriticism focuses on representations of animals in literature and film. In other words, I get to read and write about everything from the trout in Hemingway’s Nick Adams stories to Mumble the dancing penguin in Happy Feet.

Research and teaching interests:

• 20th- and 21st-century environmental literature and film
• American literature
• Women's and gender studies
• Literary theory (especially ecocritical theory and critical animal studies)

Courses:

• Literature and the Environment
• Literary Theory
• American Literature Surveys I and II
• American Renaissance/Transcendentalism
• Popular Literature and the Bestseller List
• Women in Literature

Selected publications:

Animals and Agency: An Interdisciplinary Exploration. Sarah E. McFarland and Ryan Hediger, eds. Brill Academic Press: Leiden and Boston, 2009. Includes “Approaching the Agency of Other Animals: An Introduction” (with Ryan Hediger) and “Dancing Penguins and a Pretentious Raccoon: Animated Animals and 21st Century Environmentalism.”

“Writing Can Take Place: Putting the ‘Comp’ Back in ‘Ecocomp.’” Oregon English Journal’s issue on “Ecological Literacy: Tending the Untended Garden.” (Spring 2008) Selected for promotion and distribution by the National Council of Teachers of English.

“Wild Women: Literary Explorations of American Landscapes.”  Women Writing Nature: A Feminist View.  Ed. Barbara Cook (2008).

“Exploring ‘At the Edge of Things’: A Conversation with Susan Zwinger.” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 14.1 (Winter 2007).

 “Beautiful or Badass: Gender and Power in Doug Peacock’s Grizzly Years.” “Humans and Animals” Issue of Proteus: A Journal of Ideas 24:1 (Spring 2007).

 “Invisible Birds: Domestic Erasure in Terry Tempest Williams’s Refuge.”  Southwestern American Literature 29.2 (2004).

“Of Bears and Women: The Ethics of Gender in Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams.” “Animal Ethics” special issue of Essays in Philosophy 5.2 (2004).