Associate Professor, English & Director, Honors Program
Director, Honors Program
Dr. McWhorter currently serves the Honors Program Director at Merrimack College, where she is also an Associate Professor of English and Humanities. She earned her BA in English and Philosophy from Bucknell University, and her MA and Ph.D. in English from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her areas of specialization are American Modernism, early 20th century poetry, philosophies of language, and gender, race, and sexuality studies. She is currently at work on a book project tentatively entitled Modernist Intuitions: Embodied Cognition in early 20th Century Poetry.
Her literary scholarship has been published in top-tier American and European journals, including James Joyce Quarterly and the European Journal of American Studies, and she has presented on topics ranging from lesbian erasure in the poetry of Angelina Weld Grimke to reinvigorating Honors Program student engagement after the COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S. and abroad.
Teaching is, to Dr. McWhorter, a calling and a passion. At the University of Illinois, she won the prestigious Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, beating out approximately 20,000 other graduate student teachers for the honor. At Merrimack, she has created no fewer than 10 original courses for the English Department and the Honors Program, including Literature of the Harlem Renaissance, Queer Modernism, Contemporary Young Adult Fiction, and Introduction to Creative Thinking. Her pedagogy focuses on creativity and thinking outside the box when it’s at all possible (and sometimes when it’s not). Her classes tend to be immersive, active, applied, and deeply engaged with the raw stuff of real life. She has also overseen the most significant growth in both student membership and Honors faculty in MCHonors Program history.
When she’s not in the Honors Commons or the classroom, Dr. McWhorter likes to spend her time at home with her wife Joan, her three dogs Harper, Mazzy, and Scout, and her big orange cat Tugboat. She loves Hitchcock movies, Jeanette Winterson novels, the Pittsburgh Steelers, and woodturning.
