My name is Stacey Dearing. As a award-winning teacher and scholar, I build bridges between disciplines.
A bit about me: I am an early Americanist specializing in the Health Humanities. My interdisciplinary research currently focuses on mental health in early American literary history. In November 2022, my essay, “Remembering Dorothy May Bradford’s Death and Reframing ‘Depression’ in Colonial New England,” was awarded the 2021 Richard Beale Davis Prize for the best essay published in Early American Literature.
I completed my PhD in English at Purdue University in 2018, and am currently a Teaching Assistant Professor of English at Siena College in Loudonville, New York. I have more than ten years’ experience teaching in higher education. My ORCID id is: 0000-0003-0704-8229. From 2014-2017 I was the lead writing instructor for the Warrior-Scholar Project summer sessions at the University of Michigan.
In the summer of 2019, I was the Erikson Scholar in Residence at the Erikson Institute for Education and Research at the Austen Riggs Center. At Riggs, I began researching narratives of mental health in early America. In particular, I am investigating the psychological impact of migration for both European colonists and Native peoples, as well as melancholy and suicidal ideation in colonial Massachusetts.
My research interests include early American literature, mental health, Native American literature, health humanities, narrative medicine, the history of science and medicine, and narratives of illness and disease. I am particularly interested in exploring issues of agency and identity, and analyze a variety of discursive texts and objects–ranging from letters and diaries, to medical tracts and sermons, to travel narratives and recipes.
*Header photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash
Stacey C Dearing 