Impact – Winter 2019

About the Authors

Stephanie Cage is the associate director for the Lynne and Henry Turley Memphis Center at Rhodes College, where she oversees and evaluates the development of student fellowships and experiential learning opportunities in Memphis. She also teaches in the Urban Studies department at Rhodes College. As a native of Memphis, Tennessee, she completed her doctoral studies at the University of Memphis in Higher and Adult Education. She also holds a Bachelor of Business Administration in Management and a Master of Arts in Liberal Studies from the University of Memphis. Her research interests include engaged learning, enrollment services, leadership, mass incarceration, and student success and retention. Her recent work focuses on incarcerated students’ learning experiences.

Christopher K. Coffman, a senior lecturer in humanities at Boston University, serves as the book reviews editor for Impact. He is co-editor of Framing Films: Critical Perspectives on Film History (Kendall / Hunt, 2009) and William T. Vollmann: A Critical Companion (U Delaware, 2015). His latest book, Rewriting Early America: The Prenational Past in Postmodern Literature, was published by Lehigh University Press in 2018.

Harmony Jankowski is a writer and editor for the Pervasive Technology Institute at Indiana University, Bloomington. She received her PhD in English language and literature from IU in 2014, where she taught courses in literature, composition, and dance studies. Recently, her essays have appeared in Women and Performance and A Scattering Time: How Modernism Met Midwestern Culture.

Melissa Morrissey is an Illinois Teacher of the Year Finalist. She has twenty years’ experience teaching special education in settings ranging from self-contained to co-teaching, grades K-12. She is currently a director of special education at Hope Learning Academy.

Shaun Stiemsma received his PhD in English literature from the Catholic University of America in 2017. His dissertation explores the hybridity of form in the early modern English history play, and his research focuses on the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, as well as the lyrical poetry of early modern England. He currently teaches composition at CUA, and he has also taught at the US Naval Academy and the University of Maryland-College Park.

Peter W. Wakefield has served since 2006 as professor of pedagogy and director of undergraduate studies at Emory University’s interdisciplinary Institute for the Liberal Arts (ILA) in Atlanta, Ga. As such, he oversees a nationally recognized undergraduate program that helps students construct individualized interdisciplinary majors and that catalyzes discussions of the liberal arts across all majors. Drawing on his doctoral training in Platonic philosophy, he teaches core interdisciplinary courses, including one on evidence in the humanities that examines F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, whose troubled construction of American identity he articulates in this paper. Coincidentally, Peter was born and raised in Fitzgerald’s own home town, St. Paul, Minn.

Nicholas Wilson is senior associate for research and evaluation at the Boston University Center for Teaching and Learning, where he runs the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Faculty Learning Community. He holds an EdD in learning