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; research argument; creative writing; critical
analysis; handbook entry; 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. My current 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 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.