UNH Professor Stephanie Harzewski strolls into her Survey of British Literature class wearing a pink halter top and a black shirt. She is chipper and exuberant as she greets her students. “Good afternoon, everyone!”
The room is full of about thirty students each sitting attentively at their desks, with their notebooks out and pens in hand. The lecture is geared toward discussing Ian McEwan’s Atonement. Students give their opinions and themes of the novel while Harzewski encourages them with stimulating and provoking questions.
Stephanie Harzewski is a Ph.D. English lecturer at the University of New Hampshire. She specializes in contemporary English fiction and women's narrative prose. A TA since 2000, and a full-time grad student instructor since 2006, Harzewski has currently been instructing at UNH for over two years. Her favorite piece of literature is To the Lighthouse, by Virginia Woolf.
Harzewski’s passion for English began when she was a young girl. “It was the natural evolution of my life as a reader,” Harzewski said. Her father taught her to read at a very young age, and she liked the warm connection they had together. “We just created our own world together with the same three books that may have been the root of it,” Harzewski said.
As an instructor, Harzewski has a wide and high quality line-up of texts which offer a glimpse into the power of the imagination. “It may sound lofty, but the imagination is what creates the new and is connected with empathy which gives us connections between people,” Harzewski said. Harzewski does not expect all her students to become English majors, but she wants to help inspire them to be better writers, achieve their own individual and personalized goals, and to become sympathetic to understand others.
Harzewski is very modest and is not afraid of failure. “I’m not afraid to be the first person to teach something, whether a book or a style of teaching,” Harzewski said. “I let go of any ideas of imperfection in my 20s.” Harzewski has been among the very first to read and teach hypermodern, or recently published, works. Thus, her students serve as the first, or early, criticizers on what may become connotical texts. “I genuinely am interested in what the students think of the texts,” Harzewski said. “I want them to speak frankly with me and to cultivate an energetic dialogue.”
After working for her post-doc and becoming an instructor while a graduate student, Harzewski knew that she would have to leave her home institution at the University of Pennsylvania for other career opportunities. After applying for the position, she was accepted and hired at UNH within the summer months of 2010. Although UPenn seems to be a wealthier crop, Harzewski has noticed that UNH is ethnically a lot more homogenous, with a wider range of economic backgrounds. “UNH students, to me, are more down to earth,” Harzewski said.
Harzewski has taught broad ranges of courses at UNH so far, including introduction to literary analysis, survey of British literature from 1800 to the present, higher level contemporary U.S. literature, and post-modern contemporary British literature. Additionally, she has developed two electronic courses, called “Fires of Sex and sensibility” and “Sex and Sensibility: The Rise of Chic Lit from Brigit Jones’s Diary.” As a first online instructor for the UNH English Department, Harzewski will also teach a course on masterworks for short fiction, emphasizing mental illness and literary works with alter egos, such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray.
Harzewski’s focus includes contemporary British and American fiction since the 18th century, as well as the novel of manners tradition. Her recent novel, Chick Lit and Postfeminism is intended to be a serious reference book and a comprehensive study of a sub-genre with a very unacademic sounding name. “I would like it to serve as a model for how you can take a cultural artifact that is not looked at by most people as intellectual or serious and to give a social logical artifact a critically rigorous treatment,” Harzewski said. Her novel looks at urban pockets of America and England where chick lit is a lens into changes in dating, education patterns, how women spend money, and so forth.
Students at UNH have lauded Harzewski’s courses. Andrea Denise, a junior, is an English major. “I heard [Harzewski] was a quirky and fun professor that taught her subject passionately,” Denise said. “She is fun and understanding and strives to include every single one of her students in on her love of the subject.” Denise learned to appreciate a different learning and teaching style that was highly effective.
Natalie Fortier, an outdoor education major, is also a junior. She took Harzewski’s introduction to literary analysis course to fulfill English requirements for her major. Fortier read a lot of great texts and improved as a writer. “[Harzewski] is enthusiastic about what she teaches and creative in the texts she chooses,” Fortier said. “What makes her different form other UNH professors is that she s not afraid to make herself vulnerable — she builds personal relationships with her students and isn’t afraid to be silly, goofy, or wrong.”
Michele Vizzo, a junior and a journalism major, took Harzewski’s introduction to literary analysis and survey of British literature courses. “Stephanie exudes such an intense passion for what she does and the material she is teaching,” Vizzo said. “As her student, you know that everything on the syllabus has been painstakingly selected and will play a major and important role in the class.” Vizzo learned a new respect for her writing and what she was able to take away form the required readings. “I would suggest to any major to take a class with Stephanie,” Vizzo said. “She will inspire anyone to be all that they can be.”
Andrew Merton, an English professor and Chair of the English Department, is the one responsible for hiring Stephanie. He reports that her teaching evaluations are very strong and students like her a lot. “She is a bundle of enthusiasm,” Merton said. “She is especially valuable, because she is at the forefront of the electronic course ‘phenomenon.’” Harzewski created her own electronic course for the English Department, and it has not gone unnoticed. “[Harzewski] is a scholar and published a book last year,” Merton said. “She would be a ten year track professor, and I do worry about losing her.”
Published in early 2011, Chick Lit and Postfeminism is a novel which encompasses Harzewski’s interpretations of 21st century romantic literature. Harzewski’s book also involves her experience as a publisher in her hometown of New York City in the late 1990s before her early career years at the University of Pennsylvania.
“Chick Lit” is a polite term for Princeton University’s female literary tradition course in the 1980s. The term originates from an American movement in the ‘90s where women’s avant-garde fiction became a comic subsidiary of women’s literature and advice columns. Such novels that make up Chick Lit are Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary, Lauren Weisberger’s The Devil Wears Prada, and Candace Bushnell’s Sex and the City — all of which have become extremely successful film adaptations.
Harzewski shows how chick lit, which may be the literature version of a “chick flick,” produces social observations on troubled Caucasian marriages, education patterns, heterosexuality traditions, feminism, and postmodern values.
The novel has been hailed by critics around the U.S. “Chick Lit and Postfeminism is a bold and fascinating exploration of the 'most culturally visible form of postfeminist fiction' — chick lit,” New York Times best-selling author Mary Bly Eloisa James said. “Demanding and sometimes dizzying in its range and readings, the book moors the genre in the commodified context of women's lives in the twenty-first century, refashioning our understanding of this irreverent, ubiquitous, and (contrary to popular belief) important genre of fiction.”
Harzewski’s work has also gotten attention in the United Kingdom. “Smart, thoughtful, and well-written, [Chick Lit and Postfeminism] offers a historical understanding of this decidedly postfeminist genre, while offering insight into contemporary gender politics and femininity,” Janet McCabe of the University of London said.
In her earlier years as an instructor, Harzewski spent five years at the University of Pennsylvania. She received her B.A. in English and women’s studies from Vassar College in New York state, a M.A. in women’s studies from Rutgers University, New Brunswick, and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Pennsylvania.
Harzewski is also the author of articles on Anglophone women writers and facets of American commodity culture, which have appeared in numerous peer-reviewed journals, including “Contemporary Women’s Writing,” and “The Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies.” Additionally, Harzewski is considered an expert on the chick lit genre, as she has been interviewed on such subjects by the Chicago Tribune. Harzewski has received fellowships and grants from the American Association of University Women, the Romance Writers of America, the Kosciuszko Foundation, and the Woodrow Wilson Foundation.
Harzewski is currently working on a second project, entitled, The ‘Woman Author’ Function: Twentieth-Century Anglophone Prose Writers and Their Cultural Formation, where she probes the historical establishment of literary figures. Harzewski will also analyze how writers have advanced social and national movements. She currently resides in nearby Dover, New Hampshire.
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