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Maud Casey Selected as AY19-20 Long Teaching Fellow

March 14, 2019 English | Center for Literary and Comparative Studies

Maud Casey has been selected to be the AY19-20 Long Teaching Fellow. Each academic year, one tenure-track faculty member seeking to enhance the classroom experience serves as the Department of English’s Long Teaching Fellow.

"Maud Casey is developing an undergraduate course, provisionally titled 'Narrating Madness,' for Spring 2020 that will contribute to the college's new Health, Medicine, and Humanities minor. The course, as she explains it, will 'explore the formal methods by which fiction takes us beyond diagnosis to offer the inimitable texture of a particular consciousness in extremis.' By examining the mechanisms fiction employs to represent madness, students will consider various modes of narrating 'madness'—Freud’s case histories and the DSM 5, among them—as well as the various ways mental illness is depicted in other modes of art (painting, film, for example).  Professor Casey and her students will collaborate with Red Dirt Studios in nearby Mount Rainier, an 'incubator' for nationally recognized artists and emerging artists alike.  Red Dirt Studios' Co-Director is herself a visual artist, a social worker, and an advocate for people with developmental disabilities and mental illness, and in her creative work, she explores the private states of extreme emotion caused by mental illness.  Professor Casey also plans on engaging the Department of Neuroscience and Book Lab as potential partners as she works to create 'a rigorous, interactive, interdisciplinary classroom experience' that encourages students to develop ties with thriving local arts environments and to forge connections between ARHU and STEM."