Joshua Barsczewski Assistant Professor, English |
Education
Teaching Interests
I am passionate about teaching writing because I believe writing is the best way to expand our minds and think critically about the world. As an English professor and the Writing Program Director, I am especially interested in helping students learn how to use the tools of academic writing to pursue their own interests. At the same time, I am also interested in helping students to experiment with unconventional writing styles so they can bring new ways of thinking into academic space.
My primary research interests are in the teaching and learning of writing, but I also have a background in queer studies and queer theory. I plan to teach courses on representations of gender and sexuality in politics, pop culture, and art.
One of my main jobs at Muhlenberg is to hire, train, and oversee tutors at the Writing Center. I enjoy working with tutors, who I believe occupy a special place in the College's ecosystem, somewhere between students and faculty. Tutoring well is hard work, and learning to do it well takes time. I like Writing Centers because I have the chance to work with tutors over several years, instead of just in one class.
Research, Scholarship or Creative/Artistic Interests
I am interested in how who we are as people relates to how we write. When we sit down to write, how does our background, our identity, our personal history relate to the words we put on the page? These questions have fascinated me ever since I was an undergraduate writing tutor and I got to see firsthand how vast people's experiences with and emotions about writing can be.
These questions have manifested in several distinct research projects. First, I have been collecting data for several years from LGBTQ students in college settings, where I have focused on when and where students feel comfortable writing about their lives for academic work. Second, I am interested in the writing (and actions) of student activists. How do students' political activities relate to their coursework? Finally, I am interested in thinking about how difficult life situations such as grief, addiction, failure and poverty relate to an individual's writing processes. Although these are three separate strains of my research, they all come from a similar origin: an interest in understanding writer's lives, and understanding how life and literacy intersect.