Dr. Craig Stensrud

In my teaching, I aim to foster a critical and collaborative classroom community dedicated to mutual support, intellectual development, and academic integrity. I empower students to learn more about subjects that matter to them by mentoring them through their university research and writing pursuits. I enjoy introducing students to new and sometimes challenging ideas through readings and classroom conversations, inviting them to consider anew the world around them. In 2020, I received the Killam Graduate Teaching Assistant Award for my classroom instruction. 

My pedagogical research to date has focused on the equitable teaching of scholarly speaking. As a research assistant, I helped Moberley Luger design and create the Precedents Archive for Scholarly Speaking, a UBC Teaching and Learning Enhancement Fund supported website designed to introduce undergraduate students to academic speaking genres. Moberley and I published a co-authored article in Writing and Discourse, and we have shared our research and hosted workshops at the conferences of the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, the Canadian Association for the Study of Discourse and Writing, and the Canadian Writing Centres Association, among others.

I am also a scholar of nineteenth-century U.S. literature, with a particular focus on the antebellum period. I completed my doctoral studies at UBC in 2022. My SSHRC-funded dissertation project, “Scorching Irony: Anti-Hypocrisy in Antebellum U.S. Literature,” focused on the rhetorical influence of the slavery debates on nineteenth-century American literature. I have a chapter in a forthcoming edited collection on Gothic Melville, and I have shared my research at numerous conferences, including those of the American Literature Association, the American Studies Association, the American Comparative Literature Association, the Marxist Literary Group, and C19. I am currently a member of the Executive for the Canadian Association for American Studies.