On the first day of the fall semester, we at the SJU English blog want to celebrate the recent triumphs of one of our own, Dr. Laura Lisabeth, who received her PhD in English from St. John’s in 2017 and is now a Lecturer in the Program in Writing and Rhetoric at Hofstra University.
Dr. Lisabeth’s brilliant work and innovative teaching is making important contributions to academic culture. She has a review essay forthcoming in the Anti-Oppression Composition issue of Radical Teacher, a journal that was started by Richard Ohmann.
The review is titled, “Dreyer’s English, The Elements of Style and The Racial Mapping of English Discourse.” Don’t miss it!
Dr. Lisabeth has also been invited to speak at the Columbia University Alumni reading series, to held on Thursdays this fall. She will be reading from her gorgeous and moving essay, “Seeing History.” We’ll post again when the date is fixed!
In the essay, Dr. Lisabeth describes how her research helped her see again the course of her own history, including a treasured picture of her father, which she reflected on while working in the archives:
The archives were windows on time, and if I spent enough hours there, I gradually became unmoored from present time. My surroundings, the clean tables and glass-walled quiet, became flat as photographs while the slow walk through archival time became dimensional and sensory. A sentence could become a raft carrying me to a past moment. A received historical narrative, one that has been assumed for years to be a true accounting, can be utterly shaken up and fractured by archival discoveries.
We look forward to having our futures transformed by Dr. Lisabeth’s future discoveries in archives, classrooms, essays, and other forms!
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