FLYNN, Elizabeth A. 1944-

PERSONAL: Born December 17, 1944, in Jersey City, NJ; daughter of John C. (a college professor) and Elizabeth A. (a teacher, executive secretary, and homemaker; maiden name, Driscoll) Sherry; married John F. Flynn (a college professor), August 20, 1966 (died September 7, 2000); children: Katherine E. Ethnicity: "Irish." Education: Pace University, B.A. (cum laude), 1966; Ohio State University, M.S., 1969, Ph.D., 1977; attended Northwestern University, 1981.

ADDRESSES: Offıce—Department of Humanities, Michigan Technological University, 1400 Townsend Dr., Houghton, MI 49931-1295. E-mail—eflynn@mtu. edu.

CAREER: Ohio State University, Columbus, lecturer, 1977, instructor in English, 1978-79; Antioch College, assistant professor, 1978-79; Michigan Technological University, Houghton, assistant professor, 1979-83, associate professor, 1983-91, professor of humanities, 1991—, director of Institute for Research on Language and Learning, 1985-93, department head, 1987-89; Stanford University, visiting scholar, 1986; University of Calgary, visiting instructor, 1987; guest speaker at other institutions, including Pace University, University of New Hampshire, Northern Michigan University, San Jose State University, University of Cincinnati, Free University of Berlin, and Simon Fraser University; workshop presenter.

MEMBER: Modern Language Association of America (chair of Division on the Teaching of Writing, 2000), Conference on College Composition and Communication (member of executive committee, 1990-93; chair of Committee on the Status of Women, 1993-96), Women's Caucus for the Modern Languages (president, 1995).

AWARDS, HONORS: Grant from Michigan Council for the Humanities, 1980-81; certificate of commendation, American Association for State and Local History, 1981, for "Discovering Copper Country Women's Heritage;" grants from Whirlpool Foundation, 1987-90, National Science Foundation, 1989-92, National Council of Teachers of English, 1992-93, and Reader's Digest Foundation, 1997-98, 1998-99; Elizabeth A. Flynn Award for outstanding article in feminist rhetoric and composition established in Flynn's honor by Association of Teachers of Advanced Composition, 2003.

WRITINGS:

(Compiler, with Christine F. Donaldson) AlternativeCareers for Ph.D.s in the Humanities: A Selected Bibliography, Modern Language Association of America (New York, Y), 1983.

(Editor, with Patrocinio P. Schweickart; and contributor) Gender and Reading: Essays on Readers, Texts, and Contexts, Johns Hopkins University Press (Baltimore, MD), 1986.

(Editor, with John L. Schilb and John Clifford) Constellations: A Contextual Reader for Writers (with instructor's manual), HarperCollins (New York, NY), 1992, 2nd edition, 1995.

Feminism beyond Modernism, Southern Illinois University Press (Carbondale, IL), 2002.

(Editor, with Patrocinio P. Schweickart, and coauthor of introduction) Reading Sites: Social Difference and Reader Response, Modern Language Association of America (New York, NY), 2004.

Contributor to books, including Reorientations: Critical Theories and Pedagogies, edited by Bruce Henricksen and Thais Morgan, University of Illinois Press (Champaign, IL), 1990; Gender in the Classroom: Power and Pedagogy, edited by Susan Gabriel and Isaiah Smithson, University of Illinois Press (Champaign, IL), 1990; The Politics of Writing Instruction, edited by John Trimbur and Richard Bullock, Boynton/Cook (Portsmouth, NH), 1991; Insurrections: Approaches to Resistance in Composition Studies, edited by Andrea Greenbaum, State University of New York Press (Albany, NY), 2001; and Writing with Elbow, edited by Pat Belanoff, Marcia Dickson, and others, Utah State University Press (Logan, UT), 2002. Contributor of articles and reviews to periodicals, including Victorian Literature and Culture, Technical Communication Quarterly, Journal of Composition Theory, College Composition and Communication, College Literature, Composition Studies, and New Orleans Review. Founding editor, Reader: Essays in Reader-oriented Theory, Criticism, and Pedagogy, 1982-2000.

SIDELIGHTS: Elizabeth A. Flynn told CA: "Unlike my teenage daughter, who has wanted to be a writer since she was in second grade, I was unable to imagine such a possibility when I was young. When faced with the necessity of choosing a career, I decided I would be a high school English teacher since I was good in English and thought I'd like to teach. One year of the job convinced me that it was not for me. When my late husband took a job in industry and was transferred to Columbus, Ohio, I found my way into a graduate program in English at Ohio State and into the college classroom. I discovered that I much preferred college to high school students. After the completion of my Ph.D., I found my way to an academic position at Michigan Tech as assistant professor of reading and composition.

"I was hired in support of a writing across the curriculum program. Many of my early publications are therefore about writing in pedagogical situations, sometimes within fields outside the humanities such as biology and engineering. My Ph.D. dissertation, however, was in feminist criticism, a commitment I was not about to abandon. Early in my career I attended the School of Criticism and Theory at Northwestern University. There Patsy Schweickart and I conceived of the idea of co-editing a collection of essays and subsequently published Gender and Reading, a book aimed not at the rhetoric and composition community but at the literary community. This project led to an interest in exploring relationships between gender and writing and to the publication of "Composing as a Woman," an essay that has been reprinted numerous times.

"My book Feminism beyond Modernism merges these two lines of work, investigating feminism within the contexts of both literary studies and rhetoric and composition. In it I argue that it is productive to explore feminism in relation to definitions of modernism that arise out of fields such as philosophy and the social sciences. Here modernism is seen as an Enlightenment project. I distinguish between two literary and rhetorical responses to modernism—antimodernism and postmodernism. Reconceptualizing feminism and modernism in this way enables new ways of constructing the histories of both literary studies and rhetoric and composition."