Amanda M. Greenwell (she/her/hers) is Associate Professor of English and the Program Coordinator for English Secondary Education at Central. Her research specialties include literature written for young people and the figure of the child in U.S. literature, and she is particularly interested in texts that push back against hegemonic institutions and narrow narratives of belonging. However, because of her former life as a high school English teacher who taught literature across eras and geographical borders (and her current life teaching educators to do so), her interests in her discipline are far ranging.
She is Associate Editor of Children's Literature Association Quarterly, and her book, The Child Gaze: Narrating Resistance in American Literature, is forthcoming from the University of Mississippi Press.
Children's and Young Adult Literature
20th century American Literature
English Education
Writing Center Studies
Rhetoric and Composition
Selected Publications
- [Forthcoming] “Creative Disruptions: Protest Art and Alaya Dawn Johnson’s The Summer Prince.” Teaching Black American Speculative Fiction: Equity, Justice, and Antiracism, edited by KaaVonia Hinton and Karen Chandler. Routledge.
- “Confronting Failure and Facilitating Transfer: Mentoring Undergraduate Research in Literary Studies with a UbD Framework.” Confronting Failure: Approaches to Building Confidence and Resilience in Undergraduate Researchers, edited by Lisa Corwin, Lou Charkoudian, & Jen Heemstra, The Council on Undergraduate Research, 2022.
- “Aesthetic Resistance: Racist Visual Tropes and the Oppositional Gaze in Joel Christian Gill’s Tales of the Talented Tenth.” African American Review, vol. 53, no. 3, Fall 2020, pp. 181-200.
- “The Narrative Dynamics of a Counter-Surveillant Child Gaze in Langston Hughes’s ‘Red-Headed Baby.’” Studies in the American Short Story, vol. 1, no. 1, 2020, pp. 86-94.
- “Reading in the Writing Center: Tutor Education and Praxis.” Praxis: A Writing Center Journal, vol. 17, no. 2, 2020, pp. 7-19. First author, with Gissel Campos, Sarah Gerrish, Mary Joerg, and Renee Lavoie. http://www.praxisuwc.com/172-greenwelletal.
- “Remodeling Home in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials.” The Lion and the Unicorn, volume 42, number 1, January 2018, pp. 20-36.
- New York African Free Schools and their Convention Legacy, exhibit in the Colored Conventions Project at ColoredConventions.org. Co-curator. Author credit on the following pages: “A New Model of Education,” “Margaret Odle” (with Daniel J. Pfeiffer), “Education at the Conventions” (with Alyssa Amaral), and “1853 Convention: Case Study.” http://coloredconventions.org/exhibits/show/conventionlegacynyafs.
- “Jesse Jackson’s Call Me Charley: Protesting Segregated Recreation in Cold War America.” Children’s Literature, vol. 45, 2017, pp. 92-113.
- “Jessie Willcox Smith’s Critique of Teleological Girlhood in The Seven Ages of Childhood: ‘Sans Everything.’” Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures, vol. 9, no. 1, 2017, pp. 102-128.
- “Rhetorical Reading Guides, Readerly Experiences, and WID in the Writing Center.” Reading in the Writing Center, special issue of WLN: A Journal of Writing Center Scholarship, vol. 41, no. 7-8, March/April 2017, pp. 9-16.
- “The Problem with Mrs. Coulter: Vetting the Female Villain-Hero in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials.” A Quest of Her Own: The Female Hero in Modern Fantasy, edited by Lori Campbell, McFarland, 2014, pp. 225-247.
- “‘The Language of Pictures’: Modes of Visual Representation and Spectatorship in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials.” “The Young Adult Novel,” special issue of Studies in the Novel, vol. 42, no. 1/2, 2010, pp. 99-120.
For a full list of publications, conference presentations, and other information, please see the Curriculum Vitae linked above.
Undergraduate
- Literature for Young Adults (ENG 492)
- Children’s Literature (ENG 491)
- Fieldwork in Secondary English Education (ENG 421)
- Teaching English in Secondary Schools (ENG 420)
- Teaching Writing in Middle and High Schools (ENG 408)
- Literature for Teachers (ENG 407)
- Teaching the Mechanics of Writing (ENG 406)
- Advanced Composition and Technology in the English Classroom (ENG 402)
- Introduction to Poetry (ENG 260)
- Advanced Composition (WRT 401)
- Introduction to College Writing (WRT 110)
- Secondary Education Student Teaching in English (EDSC 435)
- Writing and Research III: Honors Thesis (HON 441)
- Independent Study / Guided Reading (ENG 409)
- Honors Seminar (HON 201)
Graduate
- Graduate Thesis (ENG 599)
- Advanced Study of Teaching English in Secondary Schools (ENG 520)
- Advanced Study of Teaching Writing in Middle and High Schools (ENG 508)
- Advanced Study of Literature for Teachers (ENG 507)