Susan Letzler Cole, Ph.D.

DepartmentEnglishSusan Letzler Cole, Ph.D. at Albertus Magnus College
TitleProfessor of English
BackgroundB.A., Duke University
M.A., Harvard University
Ph.D., Harvard University
OfficeAquinas Hall, Room 318
Phone(203) 773-8562
Emailscole@albertus.edu
Courses

EN 107 Honors: Written Expression II

EN 284: Shakespeare II

EN 345: Seminar in Composing Autobiography

Senior Seminar in British and American Literature

Description

I began teaching college students during my first year of graduate school and have never stopped. What drew me to teaching, and keeps me passionately devoted to it, is the interactive classroom experience, and a dialogue that continues from one class to the next, or overflows from the classrooms into the halls or office hours, or just percolates in heads until we can all be together again. For me there is great excitement and great joy in eliciting and listening to diverse, informed responses to the shared experience of reading the same text. One of the most difficult tasks, and one which I continue to rework each year, is asking the kinds of questions that open up both texts and students, that put texts and students in dialogue with each other. I continue to teach because, though the work is ever demanding, the delight never ceases. I feel a sense of passion not only in myself as I teach but also in students who come to literary texts with apprehension, distrust or bewilderment and discover lifelong companions in plays or poems never before encountered. There is a certain look I see sometimes in the eyes of my students--a kind of wonderful"aha!"--that is one of the greatest joys I know in the classroom. Albertus Magnus College, with its emphasis on student-centered teaching, has given me the gift of knowing this joy over and over.

Publications

Serious Daring:  The Fiction and Photography of Eudora Welty and Rosamond Purcell. The University of Arkansas Press, 2016

The Absent One: Mourning Ritual, Tragedy, and the Performance of Ambivalence. University Park and London:The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1985. Paperback: 1991.

Directors in Rehearsal: A Hidden World. New York and London: Routledge
(hardback and paperback), 1992.

Excerpts from a book-length manuscript, Missing Alice, published in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society,vol. 22 ;" no. 4 (Summer 1997): 1002-1005.

"Missing Alice: In Search of a Mother's Voice," in Figuring Age:
Women, Bodies, Generations. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998 (Theories of Contemporary Culture series): 336-339.

" 'To Be Quiet on the Stage:' Fornes as Director," in The Theater of Maria Irene Fornes, ed. Marc Robinson. (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 140-155.

"Maria Irene Fornes: Sightings, " in Conducting a Life: Reflections on the Theatre
of Maria Irene Fornes, eds. Maria M. Delgado and Caridad Svich (Lyme, NH: Smith and Kraus, 1999), 79-91.

Playwrights in Rehearsal: The Seduction of Company. New York and London: Routledge (hardback and paperback), 2001.

"One Day in the Rehearsal Life of Joseph Chaikin," in Contemporary Theatre Review, volume 15, issue 2 (May 2005): 191-202.

Missing Alice: In Search of a Mother's Voice. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2007.