Sophie R. Bell, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Institute for Writing Studies
St. Augustine Hall Writing Center, Room 163
bells@stjohns.edu
Ph.D. in English, Tufts University, 2008
M.Ed. in Teaching English, Harvard University Graduate School of
Education, 1994
BA in History, Wesleyan University, 1991
I teach English Composition at St. John’s Institute for Writing
Studies. Before coming to St. John's in 2007, I taught composition
and American literature at Brooklyn College in Brooklyn, NY,
composition at Tufts University in Medford, MA, and English,
history, and journalism to high school students.
I am interested in the intersections among American literature,
education, and culture in nineteenth-century and contemporary
contexts. I study antiracist alliances and visions articulated in
social arenas from books to schools. My work looks at the tensions
between the utopian promise of schools as sites of social
transformation and community building, and the political pressures
on schools to replicate oppressive social practices of racism,
sexism, classism, and homophobia. In this work, I am influenced by
scholars working in composition theory, cultural studies, critical
pedagogy, critical race theory, feminist theory, postcolonial
theory, and childhood studies.
My literary research examines depictions of interracial contact
zones. I am interested in the ways antebellum American writers used
child-figures to articulate responses to massive racial
conflicts,such as Indian Removal and the abolition of slavery. I am
currently working on an essay about literary childhood as a space
for white-Indian alliance in Catherine Maria Sedgwick’s Hope
Leslie and William Apess’s A Son of the Forest. A
forthcoming essay looks at the ways Harriet Beecher Stowe worked
out her ambivalence over racial justice and racist epistemology
through representing child discipline in Uncle Tom’s
Cabin. My doctoral dissertation, "Naughty Child: The Racial
Politics of Sentimental Discipline in Selected Antebellum Texts,"
argues that the image of a disobedient child of color - one who
refuses to learn from the adults in power around her - became a
powerful trope for racial reformers before the Civil War.
My research on the racial dynamics of language and writing in
universities attends to student writers and rhetors as narrators
and critics of their own experiences. A forthcoming essay examines
the writing of male writers of color in my English composition
classes who engage the topic of “acting white.” Through their use
of language and their thinking about race and class, I argue that
these student writers complicate constructions of “whiteness” in
two educational spaces where Mary Louise Pratt’s “pedagogical arts
of the contact zone” are at work – the secondary schools they write
about, and the college composition classroom in which they produce
that writing.My scholarship on my teaching aims to bring my
students’ voices into the discourse among compositionists about
student writing. I feel that my students offer insights and
critiques to academic conversations about pedagogy, and writing
pedagogy in particular. The process of writing about their writing
has deepened my pedagogy and enabled me to join the two
conversations I’ve inhabited so far in parallel: academic
conversations about student writing and academic
conversations with student writers. My practitioner
research into my own practice enables me to learn more profoundly
from student writers.