Amy Dunham Strand came to Aquinas in fall 2006 with long-time interests in gender
and women's studies. She has taught across disciplines - in the Women's and Gender
Studies Program as well as in the English Department, General Education Program, Insignis
Honors Program, Humanities, and Inquiry and Expression Program. Before coming to Grand
Rapids, Dunham Strand taught in the University of Cincinnati's Honors Scholars Program
and at the University of Washington in Seattle, where she received her M.A. and Ph.D.
in 19th- and 20th-century American literature and composition and rhetoric. Dunham
Strand's scholarly works, Language, Gender, and Citizenship in American Literature, 1789-1919 (Routledge, 2009) and Political Prayer in Nineteenth-Century Literature: Petitioning Women (Routledge, 2024), use an interdisciplinary, historical approach to explore intersecting
ideas about language, gender, and citizenship in American literature and culture,
mirroring her interest in linking the study of language, literature, and culture in
the classroom. Dunham Strand's further pedagogical interests in service learning and
community engagement can be traced to her undergraduate years at Wittenberg University,
where she received her B.A. in English. She has presented on subjects ranging from
the rhetoric of women's petitioning to women's writing instruction, and has published
journal and encyclopedia articles on topics including Catharine Sedgwick's novels,
the study of American dialect, and suffrage. In her spare time, she is a student of
poetry.
