By Sarah Lofstrom, Graduate Writer
The Digital Literacy and Communications Lab has launched a new series for the ECL website called “Meet the Professor,” which offers readers the opportunity to learn more about the research and teaching of ECL professors.
Professor Liz Gualtieri-Reed has been teaching at UNC since 2000. Her research interests lie in 19th and 20th Century British Literature, Fiction and the Novel, Irish Literature, and Composition and Rhetoric.
Q: What is a project you’re currently working on?
“This summer and fall, I have been working as the Director of Special Programs for the English and Comparative Literature Department. Facilitating bringing authors to campus virtually through the Thomas Wolfe Prize and Lecture and the Frank B. Hanes Writer in Residence programs and generating conversations about literature during this academic year seems especially crucial, and I’ve so enjoyed working with the creative writing faculty on these exciting events.”
Q: Describe one fun thing you’re teaching in one of your classes.
“I just taught Season I of Mad Men in my Introduction to Fiction class. I teach this fiction on screen in the middle of the semester so that students can see how the critiques we’ve been applying to literary works all semester can help open up other forms of fiction for them. Today, we watched and analyzed the scene in which the dissatisfied housewife Betty Draper shoots at her neighbor’s homing pigeons to discourage them from returning to their cages. Great stuff!”
Q: What is one media recommendation you would like to give to our readers?
“I am currently reading Randall Kenan’s Let the Dead Bury Their Dead and forcing myself to slow down and read it in pieces in order to savor its language and stories. I highly recommend a read or reread.”
