Faculty Scholarship

DR. SARAH B. HARDY, ELLIOTT ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH

ELLIOTT ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR of English Sarah B. Hardy organized a panel on “Visiting and Revisiting the Places of Yoknapatawpha” with papers by her and two of her students in the Faulkner class, Christian P. Basel ’06 and Stephen P. Crossland, Jr. ’06, for the Thirtieth Annual Colloquium on Literature and Film, held in Morgantown, West Virginia, in September 2005. The panel was the only one at the conference to include undergraduate presenters, and the two students impressed the audience with both their research and their knowledge of Faulkner: other participants told Hardy afterwards that they envied her for her excellent undergraduate students.

In April 2006 Hardy delivered a paper on “Orlando, Middlesex, and Narrative Crisis” at the meeting of the Society for the Study of Narrative in Ottawa. Through a consideration of the novels by Virginia Woolf and Geoffrey Eugenides, she argued that characters who transgress conventional gender lines serve not only to contest cultural assumptions about sexual identity but also to thwart ordinary pathways for story.

Two months later Hardy participated in the International Meeting of the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts, which took place in Amsterdam. Her paper, “The Making of Reproductive Time Online,” was coauthored with Rebecca Kukla of Carleton University in Canada. Their research (which they are still conducting) investigates how women use Internet spaces to navigate key moments in their reproductive lives, moments often not addressed fully in traditional medicine. Through a survey of sites dealing with infertility, miscarriage, and prenatal testing, Hardy and Kukla argue that the events that make up reproduction gain robust narrative form and temporal structure through online negotiation.

Hardy, who began teaching at the College in 1995 and holds degrees from Stanford University (B.A.) and Princeton University (M.A. and Ph.D.), last spring completed a term as chair of the Department of English. She has been a faculty co-organizer for Hampden-Sydney’s Summer College for Alumni, Parents, and Friends, a weekend-long symposium held on campus each year. In both 2005 and 2007 Hardy was also a presenter during the weekends. The 2005 Summer College topic was “Espionage, Intelligence, and the Spy who loves us,” and Hardy spoke to the participants about the figure of the spy in popular culture. The 2007 Summer College topic was “Christianity and Islam: Conflicts, Coexistence, and Common Roots,” and with Elliott Professor of Economics Saranna R. Thornton, the other organizer of the Summer College, Hardy gave a talk on American film’s representation of Arab people and how filmic treatment of the Arab world might be changing today.

BEYOND THE Classroom FOR THE Classroom
Hampden-Sydney College Faculty Scholarship 2005-2008
A report by the Office of the Dean of the Faculty