Anne Brubaker
Senior Lecturer in the Writing Program
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
- Ph.D., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Current and upcoming courses
Alternative Worlds
WRIT146
We will read a diverse range of modern science fiction stories with an aim toward understanding how these texts represent, critique, and imagine alternatives to existing social, political, economic, and environmental conditions. Through stories by writers such as Ray Bradbury, Samuel Delany, Octavia Butler, Nnedi Okorafor, and Ted Chiang, we will explore how science fiction reimagines and challenges traditional ideas about ourselves, complicating easy distinctions between mind and body, human and machine, alien and native, self and other.
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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.
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Staging Science
WRIT136
We will read a range of twentieth-century plays that depict various scientific disciplines, discoveries, controversies, and characters. We will explore how scientific themes and ideas shape the structure and performances of these plays and also what these plays tell us about the connections-and misperceptions-between the humanities and sciences. Through plays such as Michael Frayn's Copenhagen, Tom Stoppard's Arcadia, David Auburn's Proof, and David Feldshuh's Miss Evers' Boys, we will consider, for example, the intersections of science and politics, ethical responsibility, scientific racism, the gendering of scientific fields and practices, the myth of the lone scientist, and the overlaps between scientific and artistic creation. This course will likely offer the opportunity to attend a local performance of a play.