Publications

 

Horror That Haunts Us: Nostalgia, Revisionism, and Trauma in Contemporary American Horror Film and Television

Co-editor, Chapter in Collection: “Damaged Monsters, Doomed Domesticity, and Defined by Misogyny: What Happens When “Final Girls” Become Grey Women.”

Co-edited.“The Mystery of the Woods: Twin Peaks and the Folkloric Forest.” Cinema Journal: InFocus. 55: 3 (Spring 2016): 121-125. Chapters in Edited Collections:

“Priests, Secrets, and Holy Water: All I Ever Learned About Catholicism I Learned from Horror Films.” Eds. Brandon Grafius and John W. Morehead. Theology and Horror: Explorations of the Dark Religious Imagination. Rowan and Littlefield, 2021. 57-76.

“The Devil and The Culture Wars: Demonizing Controversy in The Last Temptation of Christ and The Passion of the Christ” in The Bible Onscreen in the New Millennium, Manchester University Press, 2020. Ed. Wickham Clayton.  193-213.

“I Framed Freddy: Functional Aesthetics in the Nightmare on Elm Street series.” Style and Form in the Hollywood Slasher Film. Ed. Wickham Clayton. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Fall 2015. 51-66.

Co-authored with Kara Andersen, “European Horror Games: Little Red Riding Hood's Zombie BBQ and the European Game Industry,” Transnational Horror Across Visual Media: Fragmented Bodies. Eds. Dana Och, Kirsten Strayer. New York: Routledge, 2013. 86-106.

Articles:

• “Gender and Building Pedagogies of Care.” Published in both Women in Higher Education Vol. 31, No. 1 (January 2022)and The National Teaching and Learning Forum. Vol. 31, No. 2 (February 2022).
• “Pandemic Pedagogy Priorities: I do not really NEED to teach anything but my students.” The Journal for Research and Practice in College Teaching Vol. 6 No. 2 (2021). 
• “Don’t Just Print the Legend, Write It: The Odd Construction of Elfego Baca as Folk Hero.” Western Folklore 75:1 (Winter 2015): 5-34.
• “The Bogeyman of Your Nightmares: Freddy Krueger’s Folkloric Roots.” Studies in Popular Culture 36:2 (Spring 2014): 45-66.
• “Buffy the Vampire Slayer Board Game as Liminal Space.” Intensities: The Journal of Cult Media 7 (Summer 2014): Special Issue. Web.

5 Year Plan

I was having a hard time sleeping a while ago because the air handler closet was in my bedroom and every time it clicked on I work up. So I moved my bed into the spare room that wasn't really a spare room because I don't have guests and no longer foster kittens so it was just empty. 

Then I thought I'd move my academic bookcases out of my office and into the new spare room. I told myself it was a way of clearing my space to clear my mind to work on things. But the truth is I don't want to look at them. 

I look at these books and all I think is what a failure I am. 

I have up a teaching job I didn't love to move halfway across the country to get my PhD. I worked very hard to get it. I trained as a pre and early modernist in English Literature. And it was not easy, harder than it should have been. TWO dissertations. TWO dissertation directors. No support system. I was proud of the work (both versions), a historical survey of the devil in English literature and an analysis of the folkloric devil in English literature. 

I clearly saw in my head the next steps- I wanted to turn the dissertation into a book. I wanted to use the first version of the dissertation to create a website on the devil, links to research, links to images, sources. And I already knew what my second book would be, it would follow the same ideas as the first, the hierarchy and war in heaven, the idea of demonizing dark devils, but this time tracing how these ideas from the first book got forwarded into popular culture.

I DID turn the dissertation into a book, had a publisher, submitted it, and got destroyed in peer review. Some of the feedback was helpful, a lot was accurate (it very much still read as a dissertation), and some was ridiculous (questioned why I called William of Malmesbury "William"). So I set it aside for a bit. This coincided with me going back to teaching high school full time so it worked out. In 2019 I was on the job market for the third year, so was "expiring" and had decided it would be my last year. I'd taught high school before the PhD, I loved teaching, so I went back to it before I'd even graduated.

When I got the job I had pretty much switched my long-term plans to high school teaching. It was not without its issues but I liked where I lived, I liked the students, I had a comfortable life. 

But no one turns down a tenure-track job. It was at a small school where the focus was on teaching. 

It turned out to be the best teaching job I've ever had in two decades plus of teaching. The best students, the best environment.

But I was nervous about getting tenure so reoriented publishing goals to hit the requirements by third-year review so I could feel on solid ground. A lot of this had to do with my insecurity as a first generation student/professor. Someone with no support system and a deep understanding that life was not a meritocracy and there was always another shoe to drop. So I prioritized chapters and articles over working on the book, which the requirements let me. I was not concerned about teaching, I knew how to do that. I didn't have any travel planned for my first year, so I had the time and space I needed to acclimate.

Then COVID-19 hit spring semester of my first year and everything changed.

We moved online the last month or so after spring break but my school was back face-to-face that fall.

Life kept steamrolling forward, as did expectations.

I had my third-year review, but didn't really get any feedback, so I went up for tenure in year four.

But I'd been told by people again and again that I was not going to get it, so that summer I updated my high school teaching CV and was job hunting locally. The move from out west was expensive and I was deeply in debt, so moving for a job was not an option, but there were several high schools in doable driving distance, and I was searching job ads.

I got the letter I got tenure the week before the semester started.

But was not super productive that fifth year because I didn't have anything in the pipeline because I had not applied to conferences, had no writing drafted, or under review, because I had not seen the point, because I'd been told I wasn't getting tenure.

I did apply for a conference that fall, but it turned out COVID-19 was still very real and my depression, anxiety, had ramped up and was now very specific to travel, so I had to pull out.

Turns out that after you get tenure you're supposed to write a five year plan, that you revisit during your Post-Tenure Review. But our chair left, I didn't received any feedback from my tenure approval, and it wasn't until this year, year 7 total, third year post-tenure, and after serving on Post-Tenure Review committees last year, that I realized this was a thing.

So this year I'm thinking a lot about what my five year plan is, would have been, can be.

This past summer I swore I was taking off to focus on the book. I have chapters planned out, some in better draft form than others from previous work. But I had medical issues and the bills that go with them, so needed to money of teaching summer school.

So now the outline sits up on the wall in my office. I haven't touched it in months. 

It's getting harder and harder to imagine the project complete.

Which brings me back to my academic library at home making me feel like a failure. 

Because I've made so progress on the book, the books just sit there.

Because I do not teach any classes in my field, they sit there untouched.

I still love teaching here, and this year I'm thinking I need to rethink my future plans. To focus on the teaching, on prviding a solid, supportive, foundation for my Composition students. I think it's probably where I can do the best work. 

I still look for articles, chapters to publish, but my focus has shifted more to folklore, horror, than what I trained for. I'm proud of that work. I'd like to start publishing too about teaching, but I've not received much help or support for that so we'll see. I am proud of being able to do more peer review of articles and manuscripts. 

I don't know how many people have shifts like these after tenure. Or have had them post-tenure with COVID. I don't have a mentor and I haven't received feedback or help, so I feel like I'm treading water way out in the open on my own a lot. I also think it's really hard to teach a 4/4 load (often taking overloads so 5, plus summer school) and have time during the academic year for anything. During grad school the assumed model was a 2/2, not undergraduate, all in your field, could be used to try out new scholarship ideas. But that is not my reality.

I DO appreciate the freedom of the tenure and promotion requirements here. They're not onerous. The requirements are flexible on topics. I can pursue projects as I'm interested. Support colleagues. But it is still hard to teach almost all GE classes of 25+ well, in THIS moment, and all the work required to do it, adapt, AND research, write. I've never been able to write my scholarship in the small chunks of time of office hours, I prefer to do nothing so I'm always available to students and instead require large chunks of time- weekends, breaks, to get my scholarship done.

Except the last couple of years I've also had a fair amount of health issues that affect my ability to work. I'm exhausted all the time, have low energy, seem to develop new issues (diabetes, arthritis, balance issues) and new allergies (gluten, cleaning products, shampoos) for no apparent reason, and often struggle to get through a work day. Most days I come home and am so exhausted I sleep for hours, get up for dinner, then right back to sleep for 10+ hours. More recently, I spend weekends recovering from my weeks. 

Now, I'm lucky that I am a professor, the work schedule is a lot more flexible than a lot of places, and I've been able to ask for my classes to be spread out over the week, so the on-campus time is doable for me under these conditions.

I'm trying to not feel guilty about not being able to do stuff. I'm trying to not feel guilty about not taking an overload, not doing extra work. I'm going to try to not work this upcoming summer. But it's hard especially with ongoing medical issues/bills.

I do want to finish my book, and the next one. But I guess I just don't see the point much in the context of multiple apocalypses and living multiple dystopias at once. How are any of us getting out of bed with the images flooding our feeds?

But too outside of my personal issues, there is ongoing COVID, genocides, famine, poverty, fascism. And how to keep operating day by day. Keep showing up no matter what. It's like the worst extreme of the Emperor's New Clothes ever. The gaslighting that the world is "fine" is its own weight, stress, anxiety. 

And supporting students through all this, because they are aware of it all, is a lot. And because so many like to pretend nothing is wrong (pay no attention to the students, faculty, staff out for weeks at a time, constantly ill, celebrities and athletes dropping dead of heart attacks and strokes at 30, rising cancer rates, whole generations of children infected and affected by all the consequences of repeated COVID infections, auto-immune issues, cognitive issues) it's isolating, depressing, stress-inducing.

With all this, helping students, supporting them, staying up on research of interventions that have helped, THIS all feels worth it. I can see the impact, and it feels like something I can grasp. Perhaps because this idea, "Small moves, Ellie" has long been a favorite teaching approach for me.

But I don't know how I write up any of this for a five year plan. I feel like a five year plan is meant to be lofty, a bit narcississtic, specialized. When I first started to try and draft it, I was mainly angry at all the things life wasn't. I'm pretty sure that's not it. And I don't know, even where I am, if I just wanna mostly care for my students and teach, is going to fly.

But it matters. To them, to me. 

And maybe the answer is not to try and replicate an academic model that was toxic, exclusionary, and out of date before I even joined academia. Maybe resting, thinking, making more space for students, taking more time to think, to read, is the only way forward. Slowng down, doing less is hard for a lot of us, especially people pleasing first generation hustlers, but practice makes perfect. And while it'd be cool to be "known" for something, for "work" to matter, to be a full professor, I think I can write a future, a plan that prioritizes other things.

I remember years ago reading something about medieval monks, how for them, their communities, the day to day was the point. The routines, the daily work and tasks. It is something in my depression, my anxiety, my ideations, that I've clung to. I think too it's time to reorient academic life around it. How we give, contribute, to our communities, however we're defining that.

Certainly there is no sense in trying to steamroll on like the world we may have once thought existed isn't gone. A fantasy. 

Even if no one wants to admit it.

Always redesigning courses

I never teach the same composition class twice. I redesign and reconfigure every single semester. Part of this is because the students, the teaching situation is different. Part of this is my desire to not be bored. Part of it is coming across new texts and ideas and wanting to teach them.

Usually I come up with ideas the semester or year before as I come across things. I rough out the 15-16 week schedule, adding links and readings as I come across them. Then I tweak and move things and get rid of others. I move pieces around until the internal logic of the class makes sense to me. 

For the upcoming academic year I'm planning on 102, composition I be themed around dystopia, and I'm test running this in the class I'm teaching this summer. This came together pretty easily. Students will define dystopia then analyze it. It's allowing me to pull together some bits I've tried out this past year. Students had mostly not seen The Matrix, but really enjoyed it. We had a great mini-lesson on AI and Google mistakes, like telling people to eat rocks. As always, I fiddle with things and work out ideas in my teaching notebook.

This past semester we had someone present on using the TILT template, which I used this summer. I like some things about it, it helps me clarify what I'm looking for and complements using Understanding by Design. I dislike the rigidity of it, the checklist, that I've found often discourages students to explore and play and be creative.

For 103 I wanted to work in AI and ethics and conspiracy theories. This is the one where the narrative, the flow, has eluded me. I pencilled in a course. I came back and tried to identify "chunks" that I wanted.

At the end of each semester students write relfection letters about the course, readings, me, the syllabus and I use these as well as the more formal course evaluations, to revise and tweak my classes. This past semester I also had students annotate the syllabus, which I don't do every semester, but I do regularly, to see if the parts and policies are working. So in addition to designing new content, I've also redesigned my syllabus layout. The top now has "Class FAQs," then a written rationale of the class design/theme, which I used to include but had dropped. I cut the glut of compliance language bloat that had accumulated. I've moved policies to under the week by week schedule that we use all the time. 

Every semester I go back and forth on grades. I have not really done grades in my classes in years. What I DO is because I'm required to report progress reports in week 4 and 11, and midterms in week 9, and final grades in week 16, I have students do reflections at those times and essentially report what they say. I put in the syllabus that while I rarely need to,, I reserve right to push back. This past semester was a bit different. I taught one upper level English class that actually had few English majors, so I went with a four assignment, each 25% set up. And for the first semester I can remember in a long time, I had students in composition who argued for "A"s that had barely come to class or work.

I have gone round and round. Do I do no grades because it is better for students? Or because it does not put me in conflict with students? Are students getting away with things or do I need to redesign a reflection? What is best serving students? Should I put weighted assignments/grades back into composition? If I have care baked into policies, are grades doing harm?

One of the things I really love about not doing traditional grades is that I don't have to build class assignments around when grades are due so I'm not trying to chop modules in four week chunks. I can spend more time on the process for learning.

Either approach I KNOW I have to address the last month of class. This past semester work added a week 11 second progress report so students knew between midterms and finals how they were doing. Historically there has been an issue with students disappearing those last few weeks. In the past I've considered this in my course design, having that time be project time, flex time, that students can use as they need to as long as they turn in the project. But this past semester I noticed that students who were doing great week 11 then totally checked out the last month, so final grades looked very different. I think I have a fix for this. We use a reporting system for progress reports, so I think I'm going to change the reflection I have them do. Usually they write a reflection using prompts I give them. Instead, for this progress report, I'll have them respond to what I post. That they agree/disagree, and, most importantly, what they need to CONTINUE to do the last month in order to end that way.

We'll see.

Returning to 103, I *think* I've found the internal logic. I don't want the misinformation, conspiracy theory bits to feel forced. BUT I really love the idea of using "War of the Worlds" radio, world is flat podcast statements, and ethos, pathos, logos, and how they knw what they know, to walk them through research.

So, I went through and rearrnaged chunks on tiny Post-Its.

Of course I fell down a rabbit hole figuring out how to make puzzle shapes in Google Slides to illustrate how the work goes together, and when I came back Hazelbutt had decided to occupy my lap...BUT this is the 103 syllabus I came up with: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1AZR1zIliLqoaG3CNfF-fmY3SAqezoZkfixZzRoy1bRk/edit?tab=t.0

So, I feel like I've found the plot for both fall and spring classes. Both need to be revised to fit T/TH classes but that's not hard now that everything else is done.

We'll see what students think.