Professor of English and Associate Director of the Honors Program
Academic Degrees
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, literature of the Great War, ethics and literature, Asian American literature, and digital humanities.
Dr. Scanlon co-edited and authored the introduction for the essay collection Poetry and Dialogism: Hearing Over (2014). Other publications have appeared in venues such as The Journal of Modern Literature; College Literature; Approaches to Teaching H.D.’s Poetry and Prose; LIT: Literature, Interpretation, Theory; The Bucknell Review; World Literature Today; The Virginia Review of Asian Studies; Asian American Novelists; and The Writer’s Chronicle. Her professional work includes a collaborative, multi-university National Endowment for the Humanities Grant awarded for a project in the digital humanities called “Looking for Whitman: the Poetry of Place in Life and Work of Walt Whitman.”
Dr. Scanlon’s recent publications include the essay "'Afoot with my Vision': Whitmania and Tourism in the Digital Age" in the volume From Page to Place: American Literary Tourism and the Afterlives of Authors (University of Massachusetts Press, 2017) and the article "Gender Identity and Promiscuous Identification: Reading (in) on Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier," in The Journal of Modern Literature 40.3 (2017). Current research focuses in the field of modernist periodical studies and "the poetess," and on an examination of the tropes of Morse code and telegraphy in the work of the poet H.D.
Dr. Scanlon is a member of Phi Beta Kappa and winner of UMW’s 2014 Grellet C. Simpson Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching.