I am an Associate Professor of Writing and Rhetoric & Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies at Middlebury College who writes and teaches about gender, family, art, love, sexuality, race, religion and class. I love to explore genres and have published short fiction, essays, articles and poems in Pleiades Magazine, Negative Capability Journal, Blue Mesa Review, The Feminist Wire, Hurricane Alice, Narrative Northeast, Journal of Gender and Cultural Critique (formerly Phoebe: An Interdisciplinary Feminist Journal), Middlebury Magazine, Studio Potter, and The New Mexican, to name a few. I’ve also co-authored an oral history, Vermonters At Their Craft (New England Press), and co-edited a collection of essays, Social Justice Education: Inviting Faculty to Transform Their Institutions (Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, formerly published by Stylus Publishing).

In the classroom, I invite students to explore issues of identity and power in relation to writing purposes, practices and productions. I encourage an embodied approach to writing by incorporating contemplative practices and movement into my classes, and draw on dancer Liz Lerman’s critical response process in writing workshops. I am always engaged in conversation with other faculty on the topic of pedagogy, and have earned several inter-institutional Mellon-funded grants: Writing Beyond Borders and Social Justice in Higher Education, both of which facilitated faculty development across liberal arts colleges on Middlebury’s Bread Loaf campus.

An eighth generation Vermonter whose ancestors farmed Merino sheep, I am currently focused on the local and global contributions that sheep and wool can make to stewarding our soil and water. I received a Marion and Jasper Whiting Foundation grant to conduct interviews with shepherds, environmental scientists, and fiber cooperatives in the Sierra de Guadarramas and Extemadura, Spain, where Vermont’s famous nineteenth century Merinos came from. I have also interviewed women-run weaving cooperatives in the Andes mountains in Tucumán Province in Northern Argentina. Currently I am teaching a first year seminar on Sheep as Lens Into Culture and Climate in Vermont, and will co-teach a similar course in Spain this summer with support from the Kathryn Wasserman Davis Collaborative in Conflict Transformation. I published a short piece about sheep in Feminist Studies, and am creating an educational website called Sheep Ways with the help of several fabulous student research assistants (to be launched soon).

I can be reached at: cwwright@middlebury.edu