J E M Jr

I have been teaching courses in literature at the college/university level for over two decades, beginning as a doctoral candidate at the University of Iowa, where I received my PhD. I have taught at a prestigious liberal arts college in Tennessee, two state institutions (Iowa and more recently at Arizona State University), and for seminar and summer arrangements at both Oxford and Cambridge as well as an all-female graduate school in Pakistan. I have worked for ACT in vetting prospective passages, questions and response options for future iterations of Reading Comprehension exams. At Arizona State, I achieved tenure, saw my monograph Memory, Nationalism and Narrative in Contemporary South Asia through publication by Palgrave Macmillan, and spearheaded the English department's efforts to devise a semester-long graduate course preparing enrollees to teach literature at the college level. My doctorate is in 20th- and 21st-Century British Literature, but my dissertation and much of my subsequent scholarship connects to the field of postcolonial studies, principally literary texts from South Asia.

I feel deeply honored and constantly enthused to be part of a student's encounters with literature through high school and beyond. I have received various awards for teaching excellence, and though my teaching career so far tilts toward examining narratives in context, I have unusual added experience in helping to "test the new tests" students face as prospective candidates for undergraduate and graduate-level institutions. I have an extensive history of sustained one-on-one engagement with students preparing dissertations, theses, semester-long projects and so forth, and am very comfortable with working with a single student over a longer period as they embark on other, similarly long-term journeys to their specific goals in English studies more broadly.