Davidson College English | Faculty

The English Department at Davidson College welcomes adjunct lecturer Denise Alvarez, visiting professor Andrea Gazzaniga and visiting instructor Emily Setina this semester.

Adjunct Lecturer Alvarez (office: Chambers 3255 ext. 2041) teaches ENG 101 IS: College Writing for International Students which is designed to develop English writing proficiency, with a particular focus on academic writing skills related to research-based writing. She has also worked with student tutors and faculty at Davidson to help identify and address the academic needs of the international student population. She specializes in Teaching English as a Second Language. She did her thesis research on second language writing, with a focus on academic writing at the college level. She identified the difficulties international students experienced with college-level academic writing and used this information to address how teachers can work-through these difficulties. Her teaching interests include helping prepare current or aspiring international college students for college-level work at American institutions of higher education, and working in writing center environments to provide individualized, need-based instruction to students.

Visiting Professor Gazzaniga (office: Preyor 201A, ext. 2907) specializes in nineteenth-century British Literature, with a particular emphasis on Victorian poetry. She has taught at Cornell University and Hobart and William Smith Colleges. Her research concerns the ways in which the Victorian lyric reflects a shifting sense of public and private constructions of identity. Her teaching and scholarly interests include women writers, queer theory, phenomenology, film, and genre studies. She has given papers on the uses of enjambment in Victorian sonnet sequences, Tennyson's poetics of space, Die Hard's revision of the Western film, and Alfred Hitchcock. She is currently writing a monograph of Michael Field.

Visiting Instructor Setina (office: Chambers 2289, ext. 2279) specializes in twentieth-century literature and the relationship between literature and the visual arts. Her dissertation research grew out of her Davidson senior thesis and studies photography as a metaphor in and influence on experimental modernist writing by Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, and Marianne Moore. After college, she traveled as a Watson Fellow in Wales, Scotland, France, and Ireland studying the place of contemporary poetry in minority, Celtic language communities. She has taught writing courses and courses in nineteenth- and twentieth-century British and American literature and is happy to be teaching back at Davidson.