Professor Sammani Perera, a Sri Lankan, first discovered her interest in teaching when she got her master’s degree in Creative Writing – Fiction at Miami University, Ohio. “During my MA career, while working as a teaching assistant, I realized my passion for teaching,” she said. “After graduation, I continued to teach at Miami. It is this same passion that brought me to Elon.”

When Dr. Perera joined the Elon community, she first taught ENG 110. Now, she is teaching a section of ENG 255 titled “Postcolonial Identities in Literature” along with yet another ENG 110 section. Her ENG 255 course, which focuses on literature from Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean, explores the identity of postcolonial nations and how colonialism leaves lasting impacts. 

And when asked how her time at Elon has been thus far, she responded first with one word: “Impressive.” This is due to how her students committed themselves to staying safe in the pandemic and maintained a similar responsibility with their coursework.

Her favorite aspect of teaching at Elon is small group Zoom meetings because “It gives me and my students an opportunity to get to know each other better while actually seeing each other without masks.” These meetings are also the most optimal for Dr. Perera to give students personalized feedback.
(more…)

Dr. Dinidu Karunanayake brings something entirely new to the Elon English Department, and for that, we are grateful. Professor Karunanayake is of Sri Lanken descent and attended Miami University in Ohio for his graduate study where he got his Ph.D. in English Literature.

Karunanayake is a postcolonialist and Asian Americanist and uses this interest to drive his research. “I study and teach Anglophone postcolonial, global, and ethnic American literature and culture with a specific emphasis on memory and human rights,” he said. His research interests also include a geographic focus on South Asia and Sri Lanka.

The lens of popular culture is what filters Dr. Karunanayake’s research. According to him, because of popular culture’s pedagogical and discursive nature, it both influences and is influenced by socio-political events of that time. 

“Therefore, popular culture offers us critical windows to history as well as contemporary times,” Karunanayake said. “They archive history. But at the same time, as I investigate with my students, such archives are flawed and incomplete. As informed readers, we must approach the past with a critical perspective. Literature and cinema offer us that perspective.”

Teaching was an immediate interest of Dr. Karunanayake’s following graduate school as a way to further his research interests. “Teaching is a learning process and I learn with the students,” Karunanayake said. He spent a year teaching as an assistant professor of English at Centre College in Kentucky before joining the Elon English Community. What drew Dr. Karunanayake to Elon was “its investments in interdisciplinary and global education and my passion for teaching.”
(more…)

Our Faculty Spotlight for the month of October is shining on Professor Heather Lindenman. She is an Assistant Professor in the English department and teaches classes that span from ENG 110 to a Teaching and Learning Apprenticeship. If you haven’t seen her on campus for the last few months, it’s because she’s been on maternity leave spending time with her newborn baby boy! That being said, Professor Lindenman is keeping busy and has accomplished quite a lot in the past year, with three published articles and another one set to come out in November. I managed to catch up with her during a brief visit to campus and got the scoop on what she’s been up to lately.

Last spring you said you were doing research regarding the outcomes of your community-engaged writing classes and the consequences of a community writing partnership that links college and high school students. Are you still working on that or have you started something new?

I’m still working on them! Much of my research is based on different types of community-engaged classes and what students take away from them. I just wrapped up studies on a high school-college partnership where college students went to high schools and worked with students to use writing for social change. I’m also conducting research on Elon student’s non-academic writing including what students do outside of school and what they learn from that. A third project I’m working on concerns Elon alumni and explores what types of writing they do, which turns out to include a lot of emailing. I’ve also found a skill that they feel is really important is the ability to write things concisely and quickly. Overall, we’re hoping to learn how to better writing instruction here based on what alumni are actually doing in their careers.
(more…)