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Faculty and Staff
Program Coordinator
Assistant Professor of English
Alamance Building 305F
2338 Campus Box
Elon, NC 27244Erin Pearson is a literary scholar whose interdisciplinary research focuses on the discourse on slavery, the construction of race, and nineteenth-century American and transatlantic literature. Before becoming an Assistant Professor of English at Elon University, she was a Lecturer on History and Literature at Harvard and a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Frederick Douglass Institute for African and African-American Studies at the University of Rochester. Her scholarly monograph Grievous Entanglement: Consumption, Connection, and Slavery in the Atlantic World is under contract at the University of Virgina Press. Her research has also appeared in ELH, MELUS, Arizona Quarterly, Mississippi Quarterly, College Teaching, and the Norton Critical Edition of Absalom, Absalom!
Program Assistant
Program Assistant - English Department
Alamance Building 305
2338 Campus Box
Elon, NC 27244
Faculty
William J. Story, Sr. Professor in History, Associate Professor of History and Chair of the Dept of History & Geography
Lindner Hall - Arts & Sciences 112K
2335 Campus Box
Elon, NC 2724420th century US social, African American, US women's
My interests and work focus on modern United States 20th Century Social History; United States Gender and Politics; African American History; United States Foreign Affairs; and the intersection of Canadian and U.S. History. My newest class offering is a unique one, entitled 'History of Millennials and Gen Z in the U.S.'
Soul grease ~
Maude Sharpe Powell Professor, Professor of History and Distinguished University Professor
Lindner Hall - Arts & Sciences 101B
2335 Campus Box
Elon, NC 27244Recent United States History: Sports, LGBTQIA, Women, Social Movements and Civil Rights, Medicine/Disability, Oral History
I'm a professor of History at Elon University and have been since 1993. After growing up in Chicago (as a devoted Cubs fan), I attended Knox College as an undergraduate and completed an interdisciplinary independent major in Social Change.
Then I studied 20th century U.S. history at UNC-Chapel Hill, writing a master's thesis on the Black civil rights movement. My doctoral research combined my interests in twentieth century history, gender, race, class, and culture by focusing on the changes in women's sports since 1950, and culminated in publication of the book Playing Nice: Politics and Apologies in Women's Sports (Columbia, 1996).
I've also been interested in oral history methodology, medical history, and the history of disability. Palgrave published my second book, Second Wind: Oral Histories of Lung Transplant Survivors.
In spring 2020, my recent book, Transforming History: A Guide to Effective, Inclusive, and Evidence-Based Teaching was published by University of Wisconsin Press. It offers suggestions for faculty about how to design courses and assignments, understand students, choose effective teaching methods, assess student work and our own teaching, and work toward a successful and satisfying career.
At Elon, I've enjoyed teaching a wide variety of courses related to recent U.S. history as well as some interdisciplinary courses. These include African American history, women's history, LGBTQ history, disability history, and sports history. I've participated in study away and study abroad courses and served as coordinator of the Women's, Gender, & Sexualities Studies Program, director of the Honors Program, and associate director of the Center for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning.
I'm happy to talk with students about the possibility of mentoring undergraduate research projects in my areas of expertise.
My pronouns are she/her.
Associate Professor of Sociology
Lindner Hall - Arts & Sciences 212F
2035 Campus Box
Elon, NC 27244Race, politics, and inequality in the US
I study race and racism in the modern U.S., often using lenses from political and cultural sociology. My most active interests are in racial conceptualization, appraisals, inequality, and discrimination. I also maintain interests in politics and culture, poverty & inequality, commemoration, crime & punishment, pedagogy, and several other topics. Please see my Google Scholar profile for information on my publications and my LinkedIn page for additional information, as my personal website is currently down.
Professor of History
Lindner Hall - Arts & Sciences 112-G
2335 Campus Box
Elon, NC 27244US, US South, African American, Religion, History and Memory
At Elon, Irons teaches courses on US history, including upper division courses on slavery, the Civil War, and religion. He also teaches the research methods course for majors and has taught comparative nationalism (Italy and the United States) as a COR capstone. His research is on the nineteenth-century South, with a particular emphasis on religious history.
Senior Faculty Fellow In English
Whitley 203
2338 Campus Box
Elon, NC 27244The Personal Essay, Creative Nonfiction, Nature Writing, Adoption Lit, Infertility Lit, Creative Writing in the Schools
An ex-park ranger with the National Park Service, Cassandra Kircher writes about place and its relationship to family. She is the author of a collection of essays due out in 2019 from West Virginia University Press. Her work has appeared in North Dakota Quarterly, South Dakota Review, Cold Mountain Review, Flyway, Apalachee Review, Permanent Vacations: Twenty Writers on Work and Life in Our National Parks and others. Her essays have been named notable in Best American Essays, nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and received first place in the Notes in the Field Contest. She teaches literature and writing at Elon University and lives in Burlington, North Carolina.
Associate Professor of English
Powell Building 203
2977 Campus Box
Elon, NC 27244Experienced Global Educator, Administrator, Academic and Scholar
Dr. Prudence Layne arrived at Elon University in 2005. She is a proud two-time graduate of Howard University in Washington, DC, where she earned Phi Bera Kappa two Bachelor of Arts degrees in English and Political Science, with a minor in Spanish, and a Masters degree in English. She earned her doctorate in English from the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida, with a dissertation focused on Caribbean literature and specializations in African-American literature and Black feminism/womanism.
Dr. Layne is an engaging, award-winning, Innovative, and highly-skilled instructor. She has developed and taught more than twenty new classes during her Elon tenure, including some of the most popular courses in African, African-American, Caribbean and postcolonial literatures, an interdisciplinary seminar called “Prison Nation: Deconstructing the Prison Industrial Complex” and "The Call of South Africa," an interdisciplinary, study abroad program offered each Winter term. She is a highly sought after mentor of ptojects and research focused on the intersections of race and criminal justice, policing, criminal justice, and feminism. She mentors student research, internships and teaching. She guides colleagues across diverse fields in their professional development. She is a superbly-rated workshop facilator and globally requested for her work, guest lecturing and teaching in Africa, the Caribbean and the United Kingdom.
Professor of Philosophy
Spence Pavilion-Religion/Phil. 113
2340 Campus Box
Elon, NC 27244Professor of Exercise Science
Koury Center (Athletics) 203
2200 Campus Box
Elon, NC 27244Associate Professor of Religious Studies
Spence Pavilion-Religion/Phil. 210
2340 Campus Box
Elon, NC 27244Andrew Monteith joined Elon University in 2018. He is an enthusiastic teacher who values building mentorship and other meaningful relationships with students. His courses focus on helping students further develop their existing critical thinking skills in a supportive climate that recognizes their own intellectual agency and personal goals. Monteith teaches on a range of topics but social power, secularism, and American culture are frequent themes.
Monteith is currently on sabbatical until spring semester 2025.
Professor of Italian in the Department of World Languages and Cultures
Carlton Building 116B
2125 Campus Box
Elon, NC 27244Samuele F. S. Pardini holds a Laurea degree in Letters and Philosophy from the Universita' degli Studi di Pisa, Italy, and an M.A. and a Ph.D in Comparative Literature from the State University of New York at Buffalo. Dr. Pardini's teaching and research interests are Transnational American studies, Italian American and African American literature, Italian Studies, popular culture, cinema and literary criticism and theory, with a special focus on modernity in the 20th century. He is the author of In the Name of the Mother. Italian Americans, African Americans and Modernity from Booker T. Washington to Bruce Springsteen (UPNE 2017 http://www.upne.com/1512600186.html), winner of the 2018 Italian American Studies Association Book Award (https://www.italianamericanstudies.net/cpages/bookaward). He edited and penned the introduction to The Devil Gets His Due: The Uncollected Essays of Leslie Fiedler (Counterpoint 2008; paperback edition 2010). He also edited and translated into Italian two collections of Fiedler's writings titled Vacanze Romane: Un critico americano a spasso nell'Italia letteraria (Donzelli 2004) and Arrivederci alle armi (Donzelli 2005).
Dr. Pardini's work appeared in Critique. Studies in Contemporary Fiction, Italian Americana, Modern Fiction Studies, American Book Review, Annali d'Italianistica, The Cambridge History of Christianity, The New Catholic Encyclopedia, Interdisciplinary Humanities, The Grapes of Wrath: A Reconsideration (Rodopi 2009; Michale Meyer editor) and other publications. He's currently working on a critical edition of Leslie Fiedler's WWII letters to his first wife Margaret Shipley Fiedler and on a book tentatively titled Untenable Whiteness. The Itaian Diaspora, Race, and the Politics of Moderrnity Before coming to Elon, he taught at UCLA and Vanderbilt University.
Dr. Pardini is the coordinator of the American Studies Program and the Liberal Arts Forum Advisor. He previously served two terms as Faculty-in-Residence of the Honors Program.
Professor of Art History
Powell House 104
2820 Campus Box
Elon, NC 27244Modern & Contemporary Art History; Gender & Sexuality Studies
Associate Professor of Political Science and Public Policy
Gray Pavilion - Pol. Science 101A
2333 Campus Box
Elon, NC 27244Courts and judicial politics; American federal and state appellate courts; American politics and political instititutions.
Dr. Elisha Savchak-Trogdon joined the Department of Political Science and Policy Studies in 2015. After graduating from the University of North Carolina - Greensboro with her B.A. in 2002, she continued her studies at the University of South Carolina and completed her Ph.D. in political science in 2009. Dr. Savchak-Trogdon teaches courses related to law and courts and American politics, as well as courses within the Core Curriculum. Her research and teaching interests center around state and federal judicial behavior and institutions, including judicial selection and career paths, the decisionmaking and opinion writing processes, and the judicial role and outreach activities.
Director of Bringing Theory to Practice and Visiting Professor
Powell House 203
2820 Campus Box
Elon, NC 27244