Dara Regaignon

B.A., Amherst College

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

Victorian literature and culture; children’s literature; composition; writing in the disciplines; writing program administration; pedagogy; genre theory; domesticity and motherhood

I began my academic career as a Victorianist, and in many ways I remain one. In fact, the work on the transmission of social identity that I began during my doctoral training has led me, perhaps unsurprisingly, to a dual focus — and to work in and across two fields. To that end, I participate in two scholarly communities, two different and only at-times overlapping fields: Victorian Studies and Writing Studies. In both realms, I remain interested in questions of transmission, communication, and structure. All my work — the text-focused scholarship in Victorian Studies; the empirical research in Writing Studies; my teaching (of faculty, Writing Fellows, and students); and my theoretically-informed work as a writing program administrator — is engaged in questions about how cultural ideas, norms, attitudes, and behaviors are transmitted and maintained through formal structures. Whether I am developing a curricular or programmatic structure that helps faculty teach writing more effectively; teaching in a way that helps students understand the relationship between a text’s thematic concerns and its formal structure; analyzing how particular genres of text instantiate particular attitudes about parenting; or identifying national trends in writing program administration, I am focused on how overarching structures help to reproduce or change particular habits of mind.