Dara Regaignon

Director of Expository Writing; Associate Professor

Education

B.A., Amherst College

M.A. and Ph.D., Brandeis University

Areas of Research/Interest

19th-century British literature and culture; Rhetoric and Writing Studies; Empire Studies; Gender and Sexuality Studies; Writing Program Administration; First-Year Writing; Genre Theory

Bio

Dara Rossman Regaignon is an associate professor in the Department of English, where she teaches nineteenth-century British literature and culture as well as rhetoric and writing studies. Her first book, Writing Program Administration at Small Liberal Arts Colleges (Parlor Press, 2012, co-authored with Jill M. Gladstein), is the first empirical study of writing programs at 100 small liberal arts colleges. Her second book, Writing Maternity: Medicine, Anxiety, Rhetoric, and Genre (Ohio State UP, 2021), historicizes the anxious affects of middle-class motherhood and offers a literary-rhetorical history of maternal anxiety as a cultural formation. She has also published on writing fellows programs, writing pedagogy, and children's literature. Regaignon is currently at work on Vulnerable Rhetorics, a study of how elite women's claims of gendered, classed, and racialized vulnerability underwrote and justified imperial expansion in the late nineteenth-century British Empire.

 

Publications

  • Writing Maternity: Medicine, Anxiety, Rhetoric and Genre (The Ohio State University Press, 2021)
    Writing Maternity
  • Writing Program Administration at Small Liberal Arts Colleges, with Jill M. Gladstein (Parlor Press, 2012)
  • Traction: Transferring Analysis Across the Curriculum” Pedagogy, 9.1 (winter, 2009)
  • “Toxic Maternity in The Daisy Chain: Infant-Doping at Mid-Century.” Other Mothers: Beyond the Maternal Ideal. Ed. Claudia Klaver and Ellen Rosenman. Ohio State University Press, 2008. 125-144.
  • “Pemberley vs. the Purple Jar: Prudence, Pleasure, and Narrative Strategy.” Women’s Writing 11.3 (2004): 439-61
  • “Intimacy’s Empire: Children, Servants, and Missionaries in Mary Martha Sherwood’s ‘Little Henry and His Beare.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 26.2 (2001): 84-95
  • “Instructive Sufficiency: Re-Reading the Governess through Agnes Grey.” Victorian Literature and Culture 29.1:85-108, 2001