Beth Fisher

Beth A. Fisher, Ph.D. joined The Teaching Center as assistant director in 2006. She has been a lecturer in Women and Gender Studies at Washington University since 2001. She has also taught literature and expository writing at the University of Iowa, the University of Missouri-St. Louis, and Fontbonne University.

In her role directing graduate-student programs at The Teaching Center, Beth is dedicated to helping graduate students learn about and develop effective teaching approaches in their work as Teaching Assistants and in their preparation for future academic positions. To that end, she provides individual teaching consultations and classroom observations, as well as pedagogy workshops and TA training sessions. She also plans and coordinates the annual University-wide TA Orientation. Currently, Beth is working with Gina Frey to develop workshops for faculty on teaching with TAs and on assigning and responding to student writing.

Beth develops Teaching Center publications, including the Teaching Manual for Washington University Graduate Students (available at TA Orientation in August and year-round at The Teaching Center in 105 Eads Hall) and online Teaching Strategies handouts. Beth works closely with graduate students who are working toward completing The Teaching Citation, an optional program that enables interested Ph.D. students to develop their teaching expertise well beyond the minimum departmental and Graduate School requirements. In addition, Beth develops the Teaching Center Web site and serves as the managing editor of Teaching & Technology, the ITeach newsletter. With Gina Frey and Barbara Baumgartner, of Women and Gender Studies, she is working on a study of issues related to the retention of women undergraduates in science and math.

Beth’s experience in program development includes her role in helping to launch the Washington University Freshman Reading Program (FRP). During each the first two years of the Reading Program (2003-2004), she edited the FRP anthology, created teaching materials, and served as the project manager. In 2004-2005, Beth devoted her expertise in writing, editing, and managing projects to a position with a local non-profit organization that is dedicated to improving the lives of women and their families.

A specialist in nineteenth-century American literature and culture, Beth has investigated how the development of a nascent consumer culture between the 1850s and the 1870s altered dominant ideas about gender. Her research has been supported by a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship Foundation Dissertation Grant in Women’s Studies (2000) and by a University of Iowa Seashore Fellowship (2000-2001). Beth has published and presented on critical and pedagogical topics related to fiction by the recently rediscovered Mexican-American writer María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, as well as by more widely known writers such as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry James, and Edith Wharton.

Beth earned an A.B., summa cum laude, in English from Washington University in 1992 and an M.A. (1997) and a Ph.D. (2001) in English and American literature from the University of Iowa, where she first developed her love of teaching.