Michelle Moore
Program: English
Michelle Moore admits to being the girl with thick glasses who checked out a large stack of library books every two weeks.
"There was never a time I wasn't interested in reading novels and short stories," she said. "The real push came when I discovered that literature was just one aspect of culture, and that the fun part was learning and studying about the way texts are products of, contribute to, and speak back at the cultures in which they appear."
Moore earned her bachelor's degree at Dickinson College and both her master's and Ph.D. at the State University of New York at Binghamton. She previously taught as a teaching assistant, instructor and adjunct faculty member at SUNY at Binghamton and as an instructor at Broome Community College in New York.
Her interests include gender, gothic, horror and representations of violence. Moore has written numerous articles, papers and chapters on these topics and names trans-Atlantic modernism as her major specialty.
"The modernism period, which began in the 1880s, reflects the artistic response to the massive cultural, social and technological changes taking place in the world," she explained. "I look at French, German, British and U.S. modernism, among others, and how it's all interconnected with each other through film, literature and history."
For the 2010-2011 academic year, Moore was named Outstanding Overall Faculty Member at COD. She strongly believes in a Liberal Arts education and hopes her students get more from her classes than relating education with job ambition.
"Students think this connection must be understood and tangible at this very early stage in their lives," she said. "But education is more than that. It's about learning how to learn and developing a critical sense, so they can have well-reasoned ideas and opinions instead of having to defer to a manipulative outside authority.
"Teaching allows me to expose others to new ideas, art and ways of thinking, which brings me a lot of joy. I want my students to see how ideas fit together and to create new ideas, while evaluating and rethinking the old ones. Ultimately, they will learn the value of this kind of education when they succeed in transferring well or obtain meaningful careers instead of jobs at a much higher level than they could have originally dreamed."