Catherine Taylor
Assistant Professor
Creative Writing: Nonfiction
Office: Ellis 371
Office Phone: 593-2835
Email: taylorc1@ohio.edu
Homepage
Degrees
Cornell University, College Scholar in Classics and Literature, B.A.
Somerville College, Oxford University, Classics, Visiting Scholar
Duke University, English, Ph.D.
Publications
Selected Publications
Giving Birth: A Journey Into the World of Mothers and Midwives (Penguin Putnam, 2002).
“Cape Town Journals: Excerpts from Apart.” Colorado Review, forthcoming.
“Mother Country” (an essay), Nightsun, forthcoming.
“Open Studio: The Essays of Rachel Blau DuPlessis.” Postmodern Culture, (Johns Hopkins University Press, Fall 2007)
“An Interview With Susan Stewart.” Quarter After Eight, (Spring 2007).
“Trace” (lyric essay) Xantippe. (Spring, 2007).
Review of Often Capital by Jennifer Moxley. Xantippe. (Spring 2007).
“The Harwood Review: Origins. An Introduction” and “Rescinds” in The Harwood Review: An Anthology. (Albuquerque NM: La Alameda Press, Spring 2006).
“Tease” Typo Magazine, Issue 8, Spring 2006.
“Exploration Narratives,” “Helena Wells, A Biography,” and “Native American Women’s Non-Fiction,” in The Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).
Curriculum Vitae
Editorial Work
Founding Co-Editor of Essay Press, a new imprint dedicated to publishing innovative and culturally relevant book-length esays.www.essaypress.org
Senior Editor, /nor (the New Ohio Review). www.ohio.edu/nor
Work in Progress
Apart (a book manuscript) combines documentary work with the lyric essay in an exploration of family and nation in apartheid-era and contemporary South Africa. Research undertaken while Visiting Professor at the Centre for African Studies at the University of Cape Town, 2004 and 2006.
Documents of Despair is a scholarly investigation of 20th-century documentary representations of political violence across a range of media (print, film, curatorial, and digital work). Through close readings of a diverse group of texts (including work by Charles Reznikoff, James Agee, Alain Resnais, Joan Didion, Susan Griffin, Philip Gourevitch, Claudia Rankine, Jalal Toufic, and Johan Grimonprez), this book analyzes the conflicted and embedded place of hope and despair in a discourse that is at once reliant on rhetorics of representational efficacy vis a vis social change while still cognizant of its own history of failure.
Selected Conference Presentations
“Non-Fiction and the Rhetoric of the Gap.” Transgressions of Genre Panel. American Comparative Literature Association. Puebla, Mexico. April, 2007.
“Danger and Salvation in Open and Shut Histories.” Trans-generic Displacements: New Directions in Non-Fiction Panel. The Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture Since 1900. February, 2007.
“Mapping Creative Non-Fiction.” Modern Language Association Conference, Philadelphia, December, 2006.
“Fragments of the Truth: Rhetorics of Genocide.” Modern Language Association Conference, Philadelphia, December, 2006.
“Bull Scripts: Pasiphae and Figures of Desire.” Craft-Critique-Culture, The University of Iowa, April 2006.
“Hiding in the Lyric: Autobiographical Erasures and Complicities.” Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC), San Francisco. March, 2005.
“Doing Documentary Work with Diverse Communities.” Duke University Center for Documentary Studies Annual Happening. Durham, NC. February, 2005.
“Write Back Soon: Writing and the Unrequited,” Craft-Critique-Culture, The University of Iowa, April 2004.
“From Poetic Anecdote to Ethical Illustration: Birth Stories, Medical Data, and Feminist Childbirth Politics.” Iowa State Women’s Studies Conference. February, 2004.
“Stories and Social Change” Keynote Address, The National Association of Childbearing Centers Annual Conference. September 2004.
“Telling Stories: Education Beyond the Border of the Classroom.” Keynote Address. Lamaze International 2003 Annual Conference. October 2003.
“Invisible Signatures: Epistolarity, Anonymity, and Questions of Identity from the Telegraph to the Internet,” Modern Language Association (MLA) Annual Convention, Washington, DC. December 1996.
“Unmapped Spaces: Cyberspace and National Boundaries,” Modern Language Association (MLA) Annual Convention, Washington, DC. December 1996.
Courses
Graduate
Creative Nonfiction Workshops
The History of the Essay
Representations of Violence
Form and Theory: Nonfiction
Literary Theory
Undergraduate
Creative Nonfiction Workshops
Form and Theory: The Sentence from Henry James to Digital Media
Multimedia Poetics
American Literature 1918-Present