Faye Halpern

Faye Halpern teaches nineteenth-century American literature, including courses on the slave narrative and the first part of the American literature survey. Her research focuses on Harriet Beecher Stowe and Louisa May Alcott, those women writers whom Nathaniel Hawthorne called the "scribbling women" but whom more sympathetic critics simply call "sentimental." She also teaches and researches contemporary writing pedagogy. In all her classes she asks her students to write a lot; in return, she tries to lay bare the elements of the academic essay.

Her current research project puts nineteenth-century American sentimental women authors in the context of the professional male orators of the time as a way to make sense of the strange properties of sentimental rhetoric. She also looks at what nineteenth-century sentimental rhetoric might teach us about our own contemporary practices of critical reading and writing.

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