MARK HARRISON:
Mark has taught a wide range of theatre, opera and film courses at the University of Washington (as Head of MFA directing program), Smith College, the University of Texas, the Lincoln Center Institute in New York City, and Universität Hamburg in Germany, where he was a visiting professor in American Studies. For additional information about Mark’s programs at Evergreen and his professional stage and film credits, please refer to his Evergreen faculty webpage.
SUSAN PRECISO
After finishing her graduate study in English at Portland State University and teaching Literature and Writing at Portland State and at local community colleges, Susan came to Evergreen in 1992 as visiting director of the Writing Center. She joined Evergreen’s teaching faculty the following year when the college began offering team taught interdisciplinary programs for working adult students in what came to be Evening and Weekend Studies. Since that year, she has taught many programs; most were year-long, theme based, team-taught and interdisciplinary. They include: Paradigm of Progress: the Case of Victorian Britain, Images and Landscapes: Making the American Myth, From Adam and Eve to Thelma and Louise: Understanding Gender, Sexuality and Loving Relationships, The Search for a Usable Past, Dangerous Bliss: The Romantic, the Gothic, and the American Dream, North and South: Cultures in Contrast, Culture as History, Global Cities, Victoria Still Rules, American Ways of Seeing, The American Renaissance, 1905, The Age of Irony: Twentieth Century America, Work and the Human Condition, The Fifties: Fab and Fraught, American Literature of the 1850s, and Senior Seminar.
Susan values the generative, dynamic learning communities that grow with the collaboration of students of different ages, backgrounds and experience, most clearly seen in Evening and Weekend Studies programs. With Evergreen faculty colleague Sarah Ryan, she focuses her own research on adult learners, examining the ways in which the liberal arts enhance and enrich students’ lives and work, as well as the ways students’ experience in the world shapes a generative approach to the liberal arts. Their article, “Reflections on The Age of Irony: Active and Collaborative Learning in an American Studies Program,” and a faculty institute with visiting scholar, Ira Shor, provided the impetus for their continuing research.
Susan continues to be excited by each program’s potential, and she learns from her students and from teaching partners whose disciplines might seem far from hers—from mathematicians, evolutionary biologists, and physicists—as well as from her colleagues in the humanities and arts, where literature might seem most clearly connected. She continues to bring her most loved books—the novels and poetry of Victorian Britain and the classics of American literature to the study of the human history and culture. Moby Dick, Middlemarch, and “Leaves of Grass” and Dickinson’s poems resonate still. Her students will wrestle with poetry and novels. They’ll revel, she hopes in their beauty and complexity.