A smiling Aaren looks into the camera wearing a black blouse.

I am a teacher, researcher, writer, and editor.


I hold a dual-title doctorate in English and Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies from The Pennsylvania State University. I received my Master's in English from Penn State and Bachelor's degree in English and Religious Studies from Rice University.



Teaching

I find joy in teaching and entangle my research and pedagogical aims as I design courses that invite students to question how embodied experience shapes individual and collective identities. As an undergraduate at Rice University, my professors in the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality transformed my academic trajectory and set a model for pedagogical rigor and care that I continue to try and emulate. I credit them and my subsequent interdisciplinary doctoral training with emphasizing a feminist, anti-racist pedagogical practice and making me a versatile and responsive teacher. I select readings, foster discussions and assign writing assignments with the aim of helping my students develop their own awareness of their positionality (and privilege) vis-à-vis gender, race, class, and disability. I enjoy mentoring and working with students to achieve their aims and I take an interest in the whole student because I believe that strengthens my ability to teach them; it also brings the joy of learning of their successes and growth outside of my classroom. My students have responded favorably to this approach, and I have received and been nominated for teaching awards at both Penn State and the University of Delaware.

I am a well-seasoned instructor of first-year writing and composition, with additional experience teaching Honors courses at both Penn State and the University of Delaware. I have also taught upper-level composition courses in Business and Technical Writing, introductory courses in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and courses in American Studies. Courses taught in my area of research include "Sports, Ethics and Literature," "American Disillusion: Fairness, Equity and Ethics in Sports," and "London's Ley Lines: Magic, Mysticism and the Occult in Modernist Literature," a study abroad course in London, England. Please contact me for full syllabi.

Research

I am an interdisciplinary, feminist, and gender studies scholar whose work spans from modernist literature and culture to contemporary and popular culture. On the simplest level, my research is interested in how literature, art and culture of the 20th and 21st centuries explore and theorize the materiality of sex, gendered, and racial difference.Specifically, how do scientific and technological developments impact the language authors use to narrate embodied experiences? How have the changing discourses around sex, sexuality and gendered produced innovative narrative forms? How do these forms resist or work within the bad affects that would seek to pathologize or medicalize embodied difference? My first book project explores these questions in the historical and socio-political contexts of their emergence and my second project considers the urgent contemporary implications of these questions in the domain of women’s sports.  

Publications

I have published primarily in academic journals and edited collections, although I do have experience writing, editing and researching for a foodie magazine in Houston called My Table from my undergraduate days!

My recent publications are on sex-gender testing, racism and transphobia in women's track and field, the stylometry of gender in modernist novels, and eating disorders and subjectivity in graphic memoirs.

I have forthcoming work in Modernism/modernity on British-Mexican Surrealist artist and writer Leonora Carrington's inhuman bodymind and in Modern Fiction Studies on dildonics and prosthetic gender in Ernest Hemingway's The Garden of Eden.
See my CV for a list of publications.

Contact

I can be reached at edits.aarenpastor[@]gmail.com