Faculty

Profile

After serving as dean of Eugene Lang College The New School for Liberal Arts since 2011, Stephanie became Interim Provost in the fall of 2020. During her tenure as dean, the school received a $5 million grant from its founder, Mr. Eugene M. Lang, in honor of her leadership in 2012. With over twenty years of experience working in higher education, she was formerly the Academic Vice President and Dean of Faculty at Berea College in Kentucky, an institution nationally acclaimed for providing tuition-free liberal arts education to low-income students. Her accomplishments there included securing more than $2,000,000 in grants for academic innovation, increasing faculty diversity, designing and implementing new curricular initiatives, leading a campus-wide scenario planning process designed to ensure the college's continued excellence and economic viability into the 21st century, and working with the city on projects such as bike trails and farmlands.

Stephanie's scholarly research in 19th-century American and African-American literature, the history of American medicine, and digital humanities has appeared in leading journals, including PMLA and American Quarterly, and she is the author of two books, one of which, Profound Science and Elegant Literature: Imagining Doctors in Nineteenth-Century America (University of Pennsylvania, 2005), was named an Outstanding Academic Title of the Year by Choice magazine. She has served on the Editorial Advisory Board of The Bedford Anthology of American Literature and currently serves on the Board of Networked Interface for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship (NINES). Stephanie has lectured widely, especially on literature and medicine, and has created websites on Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. She is also the founder and editor of The Charles Chesnutt Digital Archive, and the General Editor of the Complete Writings of Charles W. Chesnutt multi-volume series (forthcoming with Oxford University Press). Both have received major NEH grants. Recently Stephanie received a related grant from the National Historical Publications & Records Commission (NHPRC) for her work on the project The Complete Correspondence of Charles W. Chesnutt. 

Stephanie’s early experience includes work as a medical volunteer in Central America; as a high school English and Spanish teacher; and as a professional modern dancer. She has a BA from the University of Chicago and an MA and PhD in American Literature and American Studies from Indiana University in Bloomington.

Degrees Held

PhD, American Literature and American Studies, Indiana University

Recent Publications

• Profound Science and Elegant Literature: Imagining Doctors in Nineteenth-Century America. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005. 

• Literature and the Internet: A Guide for Students, Teachers and Scholars. Co-authored with Stephen Pulsford and Richard Sears. Routledge, 2000.

• "Resocializing Literature and Medicine: Poverty, Health, and Medical Science in Postcolonial Literature." Communicating Disease: Cultural Representations of American Medicine, Winter 2013.

• "Digital Humanities and the Study of Race and Ethnicity." The American Literature Scholar in the Digital Age. Eds. Andrew Jewell and Amy Earhart. (University of Michigan P., 2009).

• "Writing American Science and Gender." American Literary History 16 (2004): 509-519.

• "Doctors, Bodies, and Fiction," Blackwell Companion to American Fiction, 1780-1865, ed. Shirley Samuel (Blackwell, 2004).

• "'Social Surgery': Uplift, Liberation, and Professionalism in Chesnutt." FORECAAST: Black Liberation in the Americas, eds. Fritz Gysin, Christopher Mulvey (LitVerlag: Munich, Germany, 2002).

• "Documenting Cultural Politics: A Putnam's Short Story." PMLA March 2001.

• "'Profound Science' and 'Elegant Literature': Doctors in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Periodical Fiction." Texas Studies in Language and Literature, 42.4 (Winter 2000): 363-383.

• "Ideologies of the Anesthetic: Professionalism, Egalitarianism, and the Ether Controversy." American Quarterly, March 1999.

Research Interests

19th-century American and African-American Literature, the history of American Medicine, postcolonial literature, digital humanities, contemporary public health issues, and modern and postmodern dance.

Founder and editor of The Charles Chesnutt Digital Archive

Consulting Editor. Whitman, Dickinson, and Teaching American Literature with New Technologies. U. S. Dept. of Education funded: 1997-2000. Contributions include: “Wounded Bodies in Whitman's War Writings," "Whitman and the City," and "Love and Conquest: The Erotics of Colonial Discourse in Emily Dickinson's Poems and Letters."