JESSICA MCCORT
INSTRUCTOR OF WRITING
Office: 627 College Hall
Telephone: 412.396.4115
E-mail: mccortj@duq.edu
Office Hours March 2012:
Monday/Wednesday/Friday 10:00-Noon
EDUCATION
B.A., Penn State University
M.A., Washington University in St. Louis
Ph.D., Washington University in St. Louis
Dr. Jessica McCort joined the full-time faculty of the Duquesne English Department in the 2011-2012 academic year. She received her Ph.D. from Washington University in St. Louis in the fall of 2009, specializing in American literature and women’s writing. Here at Duquesne, she teaches primarily in the first-year writing program, working closely with the Orbis Learning Community.
Dr. McCort’s scholarship focuses on the appropriation of children’s literature, particularly Grimm’s and Andersen’s fairy tales and Lewis Carroll’s Alice books, by women writers. Using scholarship devoted to children’s literature, childhood and girls’ culture studies, and women’s appropriation of the fairy tale and fantasy story, she explores how female authors employ children’s literature and examine girls’ reading practices and authorship in order to come to terms with questions of identity, femininity, sexuality, psychological trauma, and both literary and familial inheritance. She is especially interested in how the children’s book becomes embedded in confessional aesthetics and women’s representations of girlhood and womanhood, particularly in the work of Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton. Dr. McCort also serves on the editorial board of Plath Profiles, an interdisciplinary journal for Sylvia Plath studies.
Outside of Duquesne, she enjoys spending time with her two young daughters, Magdaline and Sophia, hunting for art, antiques, and quirky jewelry at local festivals, and going through the looking glass – in other words, reading children’s books that make her feel like a kid again.
RECENT SCHOLARSHIP
“Alice in Cambridge: Sylvia Plath, Little Girls Lost, and ‘Stone Boy with Dolphin.’” Plath Profiles 1 (2008): 175-186.
Girls’ Culture Studies Seminar, Annual Conference of the American Cultural Studies Association, New York University, May 2008
Presented work-in-progress as panel member in seminar on Girls’ Culture Studies at the Annual Conference of the ACSA
Sylvia Plath 75th-Year Symposium, Oxford University, October 2007
Paper Presented: “Alice in Cambridge: Sylvia Plath, Little Girls Lost, and ‘Stone Boy with Dolphin’”
Panel: Sylvia Plath and Female Identity
(Dis)junctions 2007, University of California Riverside, April 2007
Paper Presented: “Sylvia Plath and Fairy Tales”
Panel: Sylvia Plath
