Mara Scanlon 
Professor of English | University of Mary Washington
Fredericksburg, VA, UNITED STATES
Professor of English, Department of English, Linguistics and Communication
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Biography
Mara Scanlon, Professor of English, received her Ph.D. and M.A. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a B.A. from the University of Virginia. Her teaching and research interests include poetry and poetics, Modernism, women’s literature, ethics and literature, Asian American literature, and digital humanities.
Dr. Scanlon is a member of Phi Beta Kappa and winner of UMW’s 2014 Grellet C. Simpson Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching.
Areas of Expertise (8)
Digital Humanities
Women’s Literature and Feminist Theory
Twentieth-Century Literature
Asian American Studies
Bakhtinian theory
Modernism
Poetry
Ethics and Literature
Accomplishments (2)
Scanlon Publishes Essay on Modernist Writer Rebecca West (professional)
2017-07-20
Mara Scanlon's essay "Gender Identity and Promiscuous Identification: Reading (in) Rebecca West's The Return of the Soldier" was recently published in The Journal of Modern Literature. The article focuses on the frequently overlooked narrator of West's novel, set on the home front in the First World War.
UMW’s 2014 Grellet C. Simpson Award (professional)
2014-01-01
Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching
Education (3)
University of Wisconsin-Madison: Ph.D., English 1998
University of Wisconsin-Madison: M.A., English 1992
University of Virginia: B.A., English 1991
Affiliations (6)
- Phi Beta Kappa
- Emily Dickinson International Society
- H. D. International Society
- Modernist Studies Association
- Northeast Modern Language Association
- Modern Language Association
Links (3)
Media Appearances (3)
Beyond the Book-Whitmaniacs
With Good Reason online
2022-07-25
Mara Scanlon took her class of self-proclaimed “Whitmaniacs” to the Walt Whitman house in Camden, New Jersey. She says her students were awestruck by being in the intimate spaces where Whitman lived and breathed… including his bathroom.
UMW professors find creative ways to teach through COVID-19
Fredericksburg Today online
2020-05-04
Teaching at Mary Washington looks a bit different lately.
Professors Featured on Radio Program
University of Mary Washington News online
2015-06-22
University of Mary Washington Professors Mara Scanlon and Mindy Erchull were featured on episodes of the With Good Reason public radio program. During Professor of English Mara Scanlon’s encore interview, broadcast June 27 to July 3, 2015, she discussed Walt Whitman and his time as a nurse during the Civil War in a show titled “America the Beautiful.”...
Courses (3)
206 – Global Issues in Literature (3)
An introductory course exploring multiple perspectives on a selected global theme or issue as expressed in literature. Attending to the pleasures of literature, the role of the reader, the language of the text, and the social context of literature, the course includes both historical and contemporary texts in traditional and non-traditional forms. It explores the contact zone between Anglo-European perspectives and disparate world cultures outside Western Europe and North America.
251 – Issues in Literature (3)
Significant literary figures, movements, and topics. Specific topics vary.
457 – Studies in American Literature, 1900–Present (3)
Significant figures, movements, themes, or problems in American literature of the 20th century. Consult Schedule of Courses for specific topics.
Articles (4)
Ethics and the Lyric: Form, Dialogue, Answerability
College Literature2007 ABSTRACT: The purpose of this essay is double—to counter Mikhail Bakhtin's contention that all poetry is necessarily monologic and therefore unethical (and, in doing so, to challenge also common assumptions about the lyric that presume a singular, personal, unified voice) and ...
Mother land, mother tongue: Reconfiguring relationship in Suleri's meatless days
LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory2001 Sara Suleri's Meatless Days—a collection of meditative autobiographical tales or essays gathered into a memoir—is the chronicle of an Asian American woman's coming to terms with Pakistan, the politically turbulent nation of her birth and young adulthood, from the ...
Main content area "In the Mouths of the Tribe": Omeros and the Heteroglossic Nation
Bucknell Review2000 The morning after the 1996 Academy Award Presentation show, Claudia Cohen, entertainment reporter for Live! With Regis and Kathie Lee, as asked to explain why Braveheart won the Oscar for Best Picture...
The Divine Body in Grace Nichols's "The Fat Black Woman's Poems"
World Literature Today1998 The Guyanese-born poet Grace Nichols is among a growing network of Afra-Caribbean writers who articulate their unique heritage of double colonization as women in a post-colonial community...
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