Theresa Tensuan
Assistant Professor and Coordinator of Gender and Sexuality Studies
ttensuan@haverford.edu
Phone: 610-896-1268
Office: Woodside Cottage 302
Office Hours: Tuesdays 2:30-4:00
Courses 2006-2007
- English 150: In the Wake of War
- English 278: Contemporary Women Writers - Writing in the Margins
- English 286: Arts of the Possible: Literature and Social Justice Movements
- English 368: "Thrilling Adventure Stories" and Naked Ladies: Narrative Designes, Visual Idioms and Cultural Contexts of Comic Books
Biography
I work in the ever expanding field of contemporary American literature: in my scholarship and my teaching, I have focused on autobiography, feminist theory, critical discourses concerning race, and the interrelation between cultural production and social justice. I am returning to Haverford following a sabbatical year in which I concentrated on visual culture studies, supported by a Rockefeller fellowship and a Penn Humanities Center fellowship that enabled me to fully articulate my current project, Thrilling Adventures and Naked Ladies: Comics and Contemporary American Literature Run Amok, in which I focus on a select group of contemporary comic books that play off of the literary and cultural conventions of the bildungsroman and illustrate the ways in which the interplay between word and image in comics can literally as well as figuratively draw out ideologies ranging from investments in national identities to the dictates of compulsory heterosexuality. This research project forms the foundation for a seminar that I will be teaching this spring on comic books and has inflected my courses on Contemporary Women Writers, Literature and Social Justice Movements, and my first year writing seminar which focuses on the representation of violence.
My work with Haverford and Bryn Mawr students in the classroom has helped me to articulate and refine the central concerns of my scholarship, and I think of my teaching and mentoring in part as an investment in the ongoing constitution of a vibrant intellectual community. In my role as the Humanities Coordinator for the Multicultural Students Program, I focused on expanding research opportunities for students of color on campus, and forged a relationship with the Hurford Humanities Center that has secured funding for summer research positions with faculty members across the humanities.
In my position as the coordinator of the Gender and Sexualities Studies Program, I have been working with colleagues across the college to rearticulate the core curriculum for the program; this interdisciplinary work informs and enriches my work in literary theory and criticism, fosters my new work in visual cultural studies, and reflects the ways in which the English Department has created a matrix in which new scholarship and pedagogical initiatives are engendered.
Research
In Comics and American Literature Run Amok, I situate comic books such as Lynda Barry’s One! Hundred! Demons!, Chris Ware’s “Thrilling Adventure Stories,” and Jaime Cortez’ Sexile in the context of other literary texts to show how narrative conventions and visual idioms work to construct, maintain, and reify the discourses that encode ethnic and gender identity, prescribe race relations, mark class differences, and underwrite colonial and imperial enterprises. This work builds on my early scholarship in autobiography and the writing of women of color: my first publication was an essay on Maxine Hong Kingston’s and Audre Lorde’s work that explored the discursive complexities of “talk-story” and “biomythography” in relation to conventions and critical discourses of autobiography. This critical and conceptual focus led to an exploration of the ways in which Barry’s “autobiofictionalography” and Marjane Satrapi’s comic book memoir Persepolis literally as well as figuratively draw out the key issues and concerns that subtend the act of reading, the processes of canon formation, the pleasures of texts, and the possibilities of interpretation; this article will be appearing in Modern Fiction Studies this winter.