Ann Patten

As a professor of writing, Dr. Patten brings deep, diverse international experience, from her earlier career in finance and fundraising in New York to her study and teaching of English, Irish, and American literatures in Dublin, Ireland. Dr. Patten also has experience in the project management of multimedia projects for museums and interpretative centers and she was a founder of a communications company, Talk Business Limited, that provided teaching, coaching and writing consultancy to corporate clients.

Her composition classes promote deep thinking and solutions-oriented mindsets about real world problems. Interested in 21st century skills, she embraces the possibilities of generative AI to assist students and colleagues with thinking and writing as well as a range of tools that enhance their productivity in accreditation activities, assessment, lesson planning, brainstorming, research, drafting, editing, and feedback. While curious about new technologies, the study of how writers like William Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Edith Wharton, and Margaret Atwood continue to speak to our humanity is an ongoing passion of hers, and she would argue, is even more important in the age of AI.

Her Ph.D. dissertation sought to define the female uncanny, particularly as it appears in the ghost stories of Edith Wharton, the weird tales of Shirley Jackson, and in the short fiction of Joyce Carol Oates. She has published articles on college writing, Edith Wharton and was formerly Associate Editor of The Edith Wharton Review and a member of the Executive Board of the Edith Wharton Society. She was part of the project team for W. B. Yeats: A Life, a permanent public exhibition at the National Library of Ireland. She currently Co-Chairs Shakespeare Conversations, a public humanities project that seeks to make Shakespeare accessible and relevant in modern day experience to diverse audiences.