- Willamette
- College of Liberal Arts
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- Faculty & Staff
- Elizabeth Keyser
Elizabeth Keyser
About Me
I received my B.A. in English and Philosophy from Willamette and my Ph.D. in English and American Studies from Claremont Graduate School. I taught in several California institutions before accepting a job at Hollins College in Roanoke, Virginia. During my years at Hollins, I taught courses in American and African American literature, American Studies, nineteenth-century British literature, and children's literature. I retired from Hollins in 2004.
About My Teaching
My courses are discussion classes. I rarely lecture except to briefly place a work in its historical and biographical context. To encourage discussion I like to focus on specific passages, then on the patterns that emerge from these passages so as to suggest possible interpretations of the text as a whole. I also like to juxtapose related texts so that students can discover the connections between them. These patterns and connections, in turn, become topics to explore further in writing. As someone who has spent much time editing colleagues' work as well as directing many independent studies and honors or graduate theses, I especially enjoy helping students with their writing. I urge all of my students to come early and often to my office—both before a paper is due and after a draft has been returned with comments. This collaboration between student and teacher is one of the hallmarks of a liberal arts education.
I based my first course at Willamette on an anthology I co-edited, Cross-Currents of Children’s Literature. Since then, I have taught courses in mid nineteenth-century American literature and in British children's classics. My course in the fall of 2011, on philosopher John Stuart Mill and novelist George Eliot, is, like the very act of teaching at Willamette, a kind of return to my early focus on philosophy and literature as well as to the subject of my senior thesis (George Eliot). Having the freedom to move from Moby Dick to Harry Potter to Middlemarch in subsequent semesters is one of the joys of teaching at a liberal arts college.
Publications
For over a decade I edited Children's Literature, which helped to establish Hollins College's graduate program in children’s literature. While at Hollins, I was also able to combine my interests by producing two books on Louisa May Alcott and editing a collection of her writings. I’m also co-editor of the anthology Cross-Currents a/Children's Literature (Oxford UP, 2007).