Theresa Tensuan

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. Following a sabbatical year in which I concentrated on visual culture studies, supported by a Rockefeller fellowship and a Penn Humanities Center fellowship, I started a new project on comic book memoirs and the art of social transformation; I am fostering this work over the course of this year in the context of a Hurford Humanities Center Faculty Seminar on "The Illustrated Book."

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 here at Haverford. In the contexts of classes such as English 286: "Arts of the Possible: Cultures of Social Justice Movements" and English 278: "Contemporary Women Writers" students have had the opportunity to work with visiting artists such as cartoonist/novelist/playwright Lynda Barry, filmmaker Shanti Thakur, folksingers Charlie King and Karen Brandow, and poet Cherrìe Moraga.

This year, with the support of the Hurford Humanities Center, I am working in collaboration with Pato Hebert who is the Artist in Residence for Arts of the Possible; in addition to mentoring students in the course as they work on their independent projects (which range from a photo essay created in collaboration with students from Overbrook High School on the reverberations of violence in their neighborhoods, to the creation of liner notes for a project on the aesthetics and politics of protest music), Pato will be exhibiting his own work and collaborating with members of the Haverford community on a series of campus-based installations that will explore the ways in which we imagine, maintain, and transform the many worlds through which we move.

Research

I am currently working on a book entitled Breaking the Frame: Comics and the Art of Social Transformation in which I focus on the work of artists such as David B., Lynda Barry, Alison Bechdel, and Jaime Cortez; in this project, I am focusing on comic book memoirs that map out the matrix of social expectations, political formulations, and cultural mandates that accord power, voice, and visibility to some and disenfranchise, silence, and efface others.

My recent publications include my article “Comic Visions and Revisions in the work of Lynda Barry and Marjane Satrapi," which appeared in Modern Fiction Studies 52.4 (Winter 2006) 947-964, and “Talking-story: Rearticulating Identity, Recasting Canons, and Rereading Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior," the lead essay in National, Communal, and Personal Voices in Asian America and the Asian Diaspora, edited by Elisabetta Marino and Begonia Simal-Gonzalez (Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2005) 25-41. My essay "Drawing the Line" on Jaime Cortez' Sexile and the Fellowship of Reconciliation's Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Bus Boycot is forthcoming in the journal Biography.

Courses: Fall 2008, Haverford

Courses: Spring 2009, Haverford