Mary Anne Myers is a visiting lecturer in English at Mount Holyoke College. Her current book project is titled: Education as Emergence: A Story of Women and College.
From 2016-2020, Mary Anne was the first program director for Bard Microcollege Holyoke, which brings a rigorous 60-credit tuition-free degree program in liberal studies to women whose educations have been interrupted for various reasons. In its first four years, the program conferred Bard College associate degrees on 28 students, including all members of the original cohort. Retention and completion rates were close to 80 percent. She was also a professor in the program.
Mary Anne’s previous teaching experience includes college-level English language and literature courses for incarcerated men and women enrolled in the Bard Prison Initiative. She has previously served two years as an Assistant Professor of English at the United States Military Academy, West Point, and as a postdoctoral Teaching Fellow in the English Department of Fordham University, where she earned her Ph.D. in May 2012.
Her academic work explores the affect of unrequited love in British culture, particularly as it occurs coincidentally with the rise of nationalism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Her chapter in Placing Charlotte Smith (Lehigh University Press, 2021) “Compatriots in Liberty: John Thelwall’s Case for Canonizing Charlotte Smith,” compares the critical patriotism of two early Romantic-era writers. Studies in Romanticism has published her essay on Charlotte Smith’s engagement with Petrarch and the poets’ lessons on the sonnet as a social medium [51.2 (Summer 2014): 239-63]. Her essay in The Keats-Shelley Journal [62 (2013): 99-114] positions the poetry of John Keats in the thread of this literary conversation between Romantic poets and Petrarch. Mary Anne’s interests also include transatlantic and continental Romanticism; Victorian and modern literatures; poetry and poetics; theories of reading, writing, and pedagogy; gender issues; affect theory; and love studies.
Mary Anne has also taught literature, writing, and ESL at Mount Saint Mary College (Newburgh, NY), Baruch College (New York, NY), and Technical School Center in Nova Gorica, Slovenia. She holds a masters in English from the University of Virginia at Charlottesville, a certificate in teaching English to speakers of other languages from Baruch College, and a bachelors with honors (summa cum laude) from Fordham University. Her experience also includes a short stint on Wall Street, many years as a freelance business writer, and service on the boards of two New York City non-profits: the Books for Kids Foundation and the Grand Street Settlement. She currently lives in South Hadley, MA, where she is a member of the local Cultural Council.
Mary Anne Myers 