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Faculty
Faculty

Rebecca Warburton Boylan, Ph.D. ( She/Her)

Master Instructor

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Department/Office

  • Department of English, Master Instructors

School/College

  • College of Arts & Sciences

Biography

I have been an active member of HU's Department of English since fall 2017. I also have taught in Georgetown University's Department of Literature and Writing since fall 2006. My teaching and scholarship focus on perception/truth/justice and intersectionality as a lens for character study in global literature of 19th C through current time. I love engaging students in experiential learning. I am married to a philosophy scholar/university professor and poet and we have three grown children - a neurosurgeon, artist and art professor, and a playwright/composer/theatre director. I am an avid reader and world traveler and patron of all the Arts. I play both violin and piano. Rocky sea cliffs and gardens of all kinds are draws for me of the natural world. I follow NBA's Milwaukee Bucks, WNBA's NYC Liberty, and MLB's Baltimore Orioles and Milwaukee Brewers. I am a city dweller but also love rural sojourns (my grandfather had a farm of produce and livestock in western Michigan that I frequented while growing up). I was born in Pasadena, California, grew up in the midwest near Chicago where I also attended graduate school and enjoyed my first teaching post before moving to the DMV where my husband and I had the honor and joy of being a part of our three children's youth. A few words that capture some of my personality as well as values: curious, imaginative, honest, passionate, intentional, and an enthusiastic door opener for others. I truly enjoy writing papers - that often become published book chapters - that I frequently deliver in international conferences as I am inspired by conversations enjoyed with those from all over the world.

Education & Expertise

Education

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)

English Literature
The George Washington University
2006

Master of Arts in Teaching (M.A.T.)

English Literature and Education
University of Chicago
1997

Bachelor of Arts (B.A.)

English Literature
Carleton College
1975

Academics

Academics

ENGW 102

ENGW 104

ENGW 105

ENGW 105 Honors

ENGL 128 - Art of the Essay

Accomplishments

Accomplishments

CNDLS Grant for Guest Artist Lecture/Final Project Launch, March 2024 in “Intersectionalities from Brontës to Morrison.”

2023; GU English Department Grant to redesign upper-level English Literature seminar, “Intersectionalities from Brontës to Morrison.”

Publications and Presentations

Publications and Presentations

Taking Risks and Making Mistakes

Taking Risks and Making Mistakes: Writing as Dynamic Process, Intentional Strategy, and Reflective Method. Chapter 10 in A Socially Just Classroom: Transdisciplinary Approaches to Teaching Writing Across the Humanities

This chapter discusses how treating writing as an experimental and reflective process can empower writers. The overall goal is to encourage students and educators to embrace uncertainty, make conscious choices about their writing processes, and use reflection to grow as writers. 

Desiring Weird Bodies

Desiring Weird Bodies: Class Subjectivities in Hardy, Wilde, and Woolf

This essay pursues the complex work of perception disturbing cognitive understanding of class in the long nineteenth century’s novel. Hardy’s Jude scandalizes those complacently certain that higher education belongs to the wealthy. Wilde’s preface provokes Dorian’s readers: “There is no such thing as a moral or immoral book.” In Mrs Dalloway, Woolf’s streams of consciousness explore knowledge as gender and class dialectic. Several theorists inform perception’s lens on class, including Jonathan Crary historicizing the co-evolution of class determining individual worth and perception determining cognition, and Jean Baudrillard’s claim that modernity’s obsession with commodity replaced realism’s self-referential meaning with a socio-economic hyperreal.