Tara Roeder
Assistant Professor of Writing, Institute for Core Studies
First-Year Writing Program, Institute for Writing Studies
Ph.D. Candidate in English, Graduate Center of the City University
of New York
roedert@stjohns.edu
As a teacher, it’s important to me that my students recognize
writing as a collaborative, pleasurable, and challenging process of
meaning-making. We consistently subvert the notion of composition
as the production of hermetically sealed “essays” by establishing a
classroom that functions as a workshop both conceptually and
physically—a dialogic, creative space in which generative,
permeable work can be constructed. My composition courses focus on
bridging acts of self-assemblage and acts of connection to larger
communities; my students work across multiple genres
(self-portrait; inquiry project; creative writing; critical
analysis; letter) to critically explore the ways in which their
acts of reading/writing are inextricably bound up with their own
experiences and connected to larger questions of culture and
context. Informing my approach is a commitment to an ethical,
feminist pedagogy; it is critical to me that my students be given
the opportunity to reach beyond limited and restrictive notions of
“academic” writing in order to construct meaningful dialogues in an
environment where differences are respectfully explored and risks
can be taken.
My research interests include feminist theory and non-oedipal
psychoanalytic theory and pedagogy, as well as modern and
postmodern literatures. I am currently working on my
dissertation, entitled Provisional Fictions: Discontinuous
Selves and the Making of Meaning. My research focuses on
the role of the reader as witness in women’s trauma narratives. I’m
invested in developing a recuperative reading model grounded in a
Ferenczian model of psychoanalysis—a model in which the therapist
abandons the role of a detached observer and embraces the role of a
caring, transformative witness. I’m interested in the production
and consumption processes surrounding trauma narratives—stories
that re-construct moments that are located in, even as they
dislocate, embodied experience—as well as the pedagogical
implications of the reader-as-witness in the writing classroom.
I’ve also presented research on feminist teaching praxis and issues
of writing and ownership at the 2010 Conference on College
Composition and Communication, the 2008 “Who Owns Writing?
Revisited” Conference at Hofstra University, the 2008 SUNY
Conference on Writing, the 2008 Conference on College Composition
and Communication, the 2007 CUNY Feminist Pedagogy Conference, and
the 2007 New England Writing Center Association Conference.