个人简介

With a Ph.D. from the University of Oklahoma in English, where Stephanie taught for the past fifteen years before coming to Maine, Stephanie teaches writing and literature courses, specializing in women's literature, American literature, and theory. Her dissertation centers on the notion that Willa Cather, in her own fin de siecle conservatism, is actually a radical critic of American consumer culture. With an affinity for virtually all periods of literature, Stephanie's favorite is the period in America from Emerson to the 1930s, including expatriate women writers, and the so-called regionalist writers like Maine's own Sarah Orne Jewett of the late nineteenth century. She is also partial to the British Romantics, especially William Blake, and to George Eliot, as well as to the British Modernists. My favorite thing in teaching is introducing students to the idea that their own ideas actually have a history, and that many of the same contradictions in the culture today have been present in American culture since our beginnings. Many of the ideas Emerson or Whitman were wrestling with are still with us. I also continue to teach writing, not only in composition courses, but in all my courses. In my opinion, good writing and close reading are the most valuable skills students acquires in college life since they enable students to become critical thinkers about their own lives, and about the world around them and the information presented to them from that world.