Bio
Dr. Rachel N. Spear is an Associate Professor of English and the Gender Studies Coordinator at Francis Marion University. Prior, she was FMU’s First-Year Composition Coordinator from 2015-2021. As a scholar, teacher, and person, Spear highlights the transformative power of stories and views life-writing as a catalyst to self-awareness and cultural analysis.
She received her doctorate from Louisiana State University in Comparative Literature, focusing on women’s studies, writing studies, and pedagogy. Spear investigates life-writing posttrauma at the intersections of composition, literary, and women’s studies and fuses the expressive and healing arts with composition and autobiographical studies. Her research areas include trauma studies, writing pedagogy, women writers, and transformative learning. Exploring gender, genre, rhetoric, identity formation, and narrative (re)construction, Spear uses an interdisciplinary approach when examining nonfiction trauma narratives by women writers and focusing on the memoir genre, primarily trauma narratives and illness narratives. Spear relies on composition and pedagogical theory when interrogating benefits and implications of incorporating these texts in courses and investigating the role of the personal in composition studies.
She has published in Pedagogy and has presented at numerous conferences on personal writing, composition studies, trauma narratives, and pedagogical theory. She is a recipient of LSU’s Ann Veronica Simon Outstanding Dissertation Award. She is currently working on articles related to illness literacies and rape rhetoric and a larger book project tentatively titled Women Writing Trauma.
Creative Writing
- JourMS - 