Jillian Sayre

I recently completed my PhD in Comparative Literature at the University of Texas at Austin. I successfully defended my dissertation, a study of mourning in post-colonial inter-American literature, on October 28, 2010. My area of study is nineteenth-century literature and culture in the Americas. My languages of study are English, Spanish, Portuguese, and French.

This year I am teaching at Wayne State University in Detroit. My Fall 2010 course is The Frontier in American Literature, taught under the aegis of Introduction to Fiction. In the course we explore a variety of texts including captivity narratives, frontier romances and even science fiction in order to understand how this contested space both forms and is formed by the literature that takes the frontier as its focus. During the Winter semester I will be teaching Early American Women Writers, exploring sentimental and reform genres and the interaction they require between the body of the reader and that of - and those within - the text.

In 2009-2010 I was a University Continuing Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin and also a guest resident scholar at the Humanities Center at Wayne State University. At the center I am working to develop a reading of companion animals and animal rites in Cooper's Leatherstocking series. I will be at the Humanities Center through 2011.

In 2008-2009 I was an Assistant Director and Instructor in the Department of Rhetoric and Writing. I assisted in the Department's pedagogy course for new instructors (Fall 2008) and helped organize the First-Year Forum program and lower division course guides. As a teacher in the Department, my interests include visual and digital rhetorics and composition theory. My previous courses for undergraduates have focused on somatic arguments and identity construction. You can learn more about them here

You can find my CV here

The Work of Death in the Americas: Narrative, Necropolitics and the Historical Romance in the Post-Revolutionary Era

Wayne State University

Under Construction

Early American Women Writers (2011)

Frontier in American Literature

University of Texas at Austin

As an Assistant Instructor in the Department of Rhetoric and Writing I have had the opportunity to teach the standard introductory course as well as design my own courses that focus on writing and rhetoric. My goal in designing these courses is to improve the cultural literacy of my students while challenging them to reflect on the process of writing both at the university and in society at large.

An example of this is the documentary project from my Spring 2008 Rhetoric of the Body course, which required students to compose multimedia arguments in place of the unit essay. You can see an example of student work here:

This project was one of the winners of the Slatin Memorial MEME Award. You can read more about the project and the specifics of the assignment prompt here.

You can review other courses here and find a complete teaching statement here