Theresa Tensuan
Theresa Tensuan
she/her/hers
Advising Dean
Stokes 118 A-1
(610)896-1000
Assigned Students: 
A-C, O
Make an Appointment
ttensuan [at] haverford.edu

Education

B.A., Haverford College
Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley

Biography

As an Associate Dean of the College, I collaborate with other members of the Dean's Office in supporting Haverford students in their processes of discernment over the course of their intellectual development at the college, and in the context of our collective commitment to a community based on trust, concern, and respect. I have a particular commitment to working with community members on restorative and transformative justice processes that can work to address interpersonal conflicts as well as structural inequities.

As an Advising Dean, I aim to meet students where they are; to listen wholeheartedly to students’ questions, concerns, and visions;  to learn from students’ multivalent experiences; and to work closely with our colleagues across the campus community to ensure equity in students’ educational experience by:

  • Learning about a student’s goals, aspirations and concerns 

  • Connecting students with opportunities, resources, and networks of support and enable students to navigate college protocols and practices

  • Identifying structural barriers to equity and working with colleagues to enable all students to fully animate their gifts and get access to the opportunities and resources of the college

  • Encouraging students to reflect on the interrelations between their curricular, co-curricular, and community investments

  • Providing scaffolding as students rise to meet challenges and identify opportunities, and offering support in times of crisis. 

As a teacher in the Writing Program, I draw from my critical interests in autobiography, graphic narratives, and Asian American and Native American literatures. In "Origin Stories," the writing seminar I teach each spring, we explore how  cultural productions both reflect and contribute to the processes of constituting individual and collective identities asking the questions: "what is at stake in acts of reading, interpretation,  analysis, and creative imagination? How do we understand our own critical and material situation in these histories; what roles or responsibilities do we have as critical and creative agents?"

As a scholar, I focus on the interrelation between aesthetic formulations of subjectivity and practices of social transformation in the arenas of autobiography, visual culture studies, and in critical discourses concerning gender and race. I forge my work in conversation with disability rights activists and art historians as well as with literary theorists and visual artists.  My most recent essay, “Difference,” appears in the Eisner-nominated Comic Studies: A Guidebook (Rutgers 2020, ed. Charles Hatfield and Bart Beatty)