The Department of English is pleased to announce that Deborah Rudacille, will join the department as a visiting professor of the practice this fall.
A 1998 science writing graduate of Johns Hopkins University’s Writing Seminars program, Rudacille has been published in various local and national magazines, as well as authoring three books: The Scalpel and the Butterfly: The War Between Animal Research and Animal Protection (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2000), The Riddle of Gender: Science, Activism and Transgender Rights (Pantheon, 2005), and most recently Roots of Steel: Boom and Bust in an American Mill Town (Pantheon, 2010), a work of history whose subject matter remains prescient given the recent events concerning RG Steel’s declining fortunes in Sparrows Point.
According to Christopher Corbett, actong chair of English, Rudacille will teach four courses at UMBC next year. Her fall courses will be “Reporting the Local” (ENGL384), which will cover forms of community journalism in the digital age, and “Diagnosing Gender” (ENGL317/GWST390), a combined section course with gender and women’s studies which will “weave together the history of scientific and medical attempts to define gender with the lived experience of transgendered and intersexed individuals.” In the spring, she will teach an introductory science writing course and a reading course called “The Physician as Writer.”
Rudacille expressed her pleasure with joining the university, saying, “I’m very excited about my courses and eager to get started teaching this fall. I’ve heard great things about UMBC students from instructors who have taught at the school–that they are smart, motivated and hard-working. Engaging with such a high caliber of students is what I am most looking forward to at UMBC.”
More of Rudacille’s previous work can be found at her website.
