Annette Sisson
A native Hoosier, Dr. Annette Sisson lived in Indiana until the job market drew her to Belmont University in Nashville, TN in 1988, where she began teaching in 1989 and was hired as a full-time professor in 1991. She graduated from University of Evansville with a B.A. in English ('80) and earned her M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Indiana University ('86, '93). She specialized in British literature, particularly nineteenth-century studies, but she enjoys teaching courses on a variety of topics, including Victorian literature; religion and questions of faith and doubt; gender; the novel; literature and film; literature and theatre; poetry; theory of autiobiography; epistemology, metaphor, and the question of meaning; contemporary culture and society; and writing.
Dr. Sisson served as Director of General Education for eight years (1998-2006), where she led the program and the campus through two significant changes in the core curriculum. She teaches the First-Year Seminar "Ways of Knowing" course regularly, and she also enjoys teaching collaboratively with other professors, which she does regularly in the General Education program's Linked Cohort Courses. In the First-Year Seminar and Linked Cohort courses, she uses many "engaged learning" pedagogies and enjoys mentoring her students in their development as students and young adults. She sees herself not so much as "teaching English" as "teaching students," but of course the discipline that she loves and shares with them is English.
She has also taught courses in England twice and plans to do further teaching in Britain in the future. Moreover, she has often used various "experiential learning" pedagogies (including Service Learning) in her classes and hopes to be returning to that endeavor in Fall 2009 as part of Belmont's "Teagle Grant" project, which studies and assesses whether and/or how "experiential learning" affects student learning. Finally, she has directed and served as a reader on many master's and honors theses over the years.
Dr. Sisson wrote her dissertation on George Eliot, focusing on the rhetorical and pedagogical strategies that Eliot emploiys in her novels. She has published poems, book reviews, essays, and an article on James Joyce, and she has presented at many conferences on Victorian literature, on General Education reform/administration, and on classroom teaching and pedagogy.
Office: WHB 206B Phone: 615.460.6803 email: annette.sisson@belmont.edu
