Anne Brubaker

Senior Lecturer in the Writing Program

Contact
Phone:
+1 (781) 283-3897
Email:
abrubake@wellesley.edu
Department
Writing
Calderwood Seminars in Public Writing

Interested in modern and contemporary American literature, the cultural study of science and technology, gender and women's writing, academic and professional writing, and film criticism and theory.

My research and teaching focuses on modern and contemporary American literature, science and technology studies, and gender and race studies. I’m interested in how scientific language and thought play an integral role in cultural formations of identity and difference. My current research includes, for example, an article on Ida B. Wells’ use of statistics in her anti-lynching campaign during the 1890s, as well as a project on speculative writer Octavia E. Butler.
Just as my research focuses on subjects that cut across disciplinary boundaries, my teaching strives to develop in students a set of skills that translate to any field of inquiry, including especially the ability to analyze, contextualize, and draw implications from a particular written or visual text, to approach an issue from multiple perspectives, and to develop supported arguments both orally and through writing. I teach writing courses on the connections between literature and science, science fiction, and food and culture. In addition to my introductory writing courses, I also teach a 300-level Calderwood Seminar in Public Writing on Data Humanism, and I’m the Coordinator of the Peer Writing Tutors.
I hail from the midwest - central Ohio - and moved to Massachusetts in 2010, after living in Illinois for six years. I still miss flat, wide open spaces from time to time, but I’ve come to appreciate the beauty and bustle of the Northeast. I have two boys and a dog named Copper. In my spare time, I’m reading, writing, running, cooking, or getting into a good tv series.
My other work has appeared in American Quarterly, New Literary History, Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture, Configurations: A Journal for Literature, Science, and Technology, and The Palgrave Handbook of Literature and Mathematics.

Education

  • B.A., Dickinson College
  • M.A., University of Sussex (Brighton, England)
  • Ph.D., University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign)

Current and upcoming courses

Are We What We Eat? Writing about Food, Culture, and Community

WRIT128

This course will start with the premise that food is an essential ingredient in the making of selves, families, communities, regions, and nations. We will explore the ways that we celebrate food traditions, create new habits and tastes, and also respond to food problems (e.g. food scarcity and safety, climate change and land use, and the complex networks of food producers, servers, and consumers). Our readings will draw from a variety of different fields and perspectives, including literature, history, anthropology, and environmental studies, as well as various genres of food writing - the personal essay, the recipe, food blogs and podcasts, and scholarly essays on the intersections between food and culture.