PEDABLOGUE

Photo by Jim Judkis Photography

Welcome to Pedablogue.

As my "personal inquiry into the scholarship of teaching," this weblog is the place I turn to in order to share my experiences and experiments in the classroom, to discuss recent reading in pedagogical theory and educational news, to reflect on educational practices, and to generally talk with other teachers about the art of teaching. In the spirit of "inquiry" I try to raise questions and explore issues about teaching theory and praxis here. In the spirit of "scholarship" I share my research here in the hope that it will spark dialogue and critique. I blog because it keeps me critically engaged in the art and scholarship of teaching -- and I always write with the hope that what I post here will help those who discover these pages, no matter what their interest or experience. -- Michael Arnzen

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Academic Biography

I have been teaching since 1992. Presently, I am serving as Division Chair of the Humanities at Seton Hill University, where I am a full Professor of English. My courses in English run the gamut from expository and creative writing to literary criticism and film history. I also mentor novel writers and lead workshops in SHU's unique Master of the Arts program in Writing Popular Fiction. I was faculty advisor to the campus literary magazine, Eye Contact, from 1999-2009.

I consider myself a "scholar-practitioner" of popular fiction. In addition to teaching English full-time and studying literature, film, and popular culture, I also actively write and publish fiction and poetry, predominantly in the horror genre. My creative writing has won significant literary awards, including four Bram Stoker Awards and the International Horror Critics Guild Award. My latest books are Proverbs for Monsters (a "best of Arnzen" story collection) and 100 Jolts: Shockingly Short Stories (a collection of dark and humorous flash fiction). If you'd like to learn more about my "dark side," I highly encourage you to visit my offbeat website, gorelets.com or sign up for my award-winning e-mail newsletter, The Goreletter.

My academic scholarship is also primarily focused on the horror genre. My doctoral dissertation -- entitled The Popular Uncanny -- explored Freud's theory of "The Uncanny" -- and various facets of what literary critics call "uncanny criticism" -- in relation to mass culture in the 20th Century. I guest edited a special issue of the journal Paradoxa on the topic ("The Return of the Uncanny"). Guide Dog Books will be publishing an updated version of The Popular Uncanny in the year ahead. I have also published criticism about popular texts and the horror genre in journals like Narrrative, The Journal of Popular Film and Television, New York Review of Science Fiction, and others. I presently sit on the editorial board of Paradoxa: Studies in World Literary Genres and Dissections. My latest pedagogy article appears in The Journal of Transformative Theory.

• Visit my faculty bio page at Seton Hill University
• Visit my scholarly blog on The Popular Uncanny
• Check out my bibliography of published works wiki
• Read my writer's bio.
• Browse the weblog version of my horror fiction newsletter, The Goreletter

Teaching Experience

• Professor of English, Seton Hill University, 1999-Present
  
• Graduate Teaching Fellow, English, University of Oregon, 1994-99
  
• Teaching Assistant, English, University of Idaho, 1992-94
  

Education

• Ph.D. in English and American Literature, University of Oregon (1999)
• MA in English, University of Idaho (1994)
• BA in English, Colorado State University - Pueblo (1991)

Influential teachers: Kathleen Karlyn, Kenneth Calhoon, Julia Lesage, Lance Olsen, Beth Ann Bassein, Cynthia Taylor, Steve Kaplan, Shawnalee Whitney, Pauline Carochi ...