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Stephanie Batterson

Lecturer
Contact
  • sbatterson@tamu.edu
  • LAAH 318
Professional Links

Education

Ph.D, English, University of Iowa, August 2018

M.A., Liberal Studies, CUNY Graduate Center, May 2012

B.A., Creative Writing, University of California, San Diego, June 2010

Bio

Dr. Stephanie Batterson (formerly Tsank) graduated from the University of Iowa with a PhD in English with a focus on late 19th and early 20th century American literature, food studies, and realism. She has taught special topics courses in English, Rhetoric, and business communication. She is currently working on a monograph titled “Eating the American Dream: Food, Ethnicity, and Assimilation in American Literary Realism,” which argues that fin-de-siècle ideas about consumption were intertwined with conceptions of U.S. citizenship, and that realist writers responded to—and helped shape—what it meant to be an American citizen by engaging with culinary themes in their work. Her scholarship has appeared in Cather Studies, Studies in American Naturalism, American Studies, the Willa Cather Review, and Plath Profiles. She has also contributed to the Cambridge History of the Literature of the U.S. South (ed. by Harry Stecopoulos) and MLA’s Options for Teaching Series, Teaching Food in Literature (ed. by Jeff Birkenstein, forthcoming).

Honors and Awards

  • Office of the Executive Vice President and Provost “Faculty Who Make a Difference” List, 2019, 2020, 2022, 2023
  • Woodress Scholar Research Grant, The Cather Project, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, 2018
  • Ballard/Seashore Dissertation Fellowship, Graduate College, University of Iowa, 2017
  • W.R. Irwin Teaching Award, Department of English, University of Iowa, 2017

Publications

Peer Reviewed Articles

  • “Under the White Mulberry Tree: Food and Artistry in Cather’s Orchards.” January 2020, Cather Studies 12: Willa Cather and the Arts.
  • “Inside Mary Johnson’s Mouth: Crane’s Realism and Sensing the Slums in Maggie: A Girl of the Streets.” Studies in American Naturalism, vol. 13., no. 1, Summer 2018, pp. 24-43.
  • “The Ideal Observer Meets the Ideal Consumer: Realism, Domestic Science, and Immigrant Foodways in Willa Cather’s My Ántonia.” American Studies, The Food Issue, vol.57, no. 3, 2018, pp. 39-56.
  • “A Thing to be Discarded: Culinary Appropriation and Displacement in Willa Cather’s My Ántonia.” Willa Cather Review, vol. 60, no. 2, Winter 2017, pp. 16-22.
  • “Re-living Sylvia Plath—the Poetess, the Myth, the American, for the Fifth Anniversary of Plath Profiles.” Plath Profiles, vol. 5, Summer 2012, pp. 140-46.
  • “The Bell Jar: A Psychological Case Study.” Plath Profiles, vol. 3, Summer 2010, pp. 166-77.

Book Chapters

  • “Food as Reflection and Self-Exploration: Teaching Food Across Disciplines.” Teaching Food in Literature, MLA’s Options for Teaching Series, edited by Jeff Birkenstein, forthcoming.
  • “‘Midnight Bakings Amid Starvation: Food and Aesthetics in the Slave Narrative.” Cambridge History of the Literature of the U.S. South, edited by Harilaos Stecopoulos, Cambridge UP, 2021.

Areas of Specialty

  • 19th and 20th century American literature
  • Food studies
  • Realism
  • Immigration Studies
  • Writing in the Disciplines