Visting Assistant Professor of English, 2024/2025
About Erika:
Book that changed your life?
Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves. Although House of Leaves is the work of a contemporary American author, the universal themes it explores—relationships, self-discovery, trauma, and the vast unknowability that comes with being human—are the same themes we find in the works of Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Donne in the early modern period. I became fascinated with House of Leaves just before I began graduate school, and I subsequently jumped at the first opportunity to take a course that covered it. During this class, I was drawn by the way the novel forces readers to grapple with its physicality, its intertextuality, and its narrative construction. Re-reading this novel at such a pivotal point of my professional career was influential to my own academic focus on the early modern period, as it reinforced the inherent constructions in the work I was studying in different ways.
What do you love about K?
The importance of community at K College is inspiring. This is evident in campus life more broadly, but I also see it in the way that each individual course becomes its own community. Students are excited to learn from each other and participate in collaborative work, and I have found the same joy in collaboration amongst faculty groups, as well.
Advice you can’t stop giving?
Read your work – creative and critical – aloud.
Courses Taught:
- ENGL 152: RTW: Genre: Mystery and Crime Fiction
- ENGL 156: RTW: Social Justice
- SEMN 176: FYS: At Home
- ENGL 265: Shakespeare