{"id":43463,"date":"2011-07-01T13:39:49","date_gmt":"2011-07-01T17:39:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/?p=43463"},"modified":"2011-08-18T09:49:00","modified_gmt":"2011-08-18T13:49:00","slug":"having-read-her-way-to-a-new-career","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/2011\/07\/having-read-her-way-to-a-new-career\/","title":{"rendered":"Having Read Her Way to a New Career"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Sharon<\/a>
Sharon Harris, professor of English. (Peter Morenus\/UConn Photo)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cI had some terrific professors who encouraged me to go on to grad school,\u201d says Harris, today an English professor in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and director of UConn\u2019s Humanities Institute. \u201cI thought the most I would do is to get an MA. But once I was immersed, I realized that what I loved more than anything was doing research.\u201d<\/p>\n

That passion for research has led her to publish dozens of articles and book chapters, in addition to 15 books\u2014from collections of critical essays to anthologies and, among her most recent works, a scholarly biography\u2014all of which have stemmed from her fascination with \u00a0literary history.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy primary focus is always the literature,\u201d says Harris, whose current projects include an anthology of international feminist writings from ancient Greece to the present. \u201cBut it\u2019s really the culture itself that fascinates me, and what the literature was presenting and why.\u201d<\/p>\n

An expert in 19th-century American \u00a0literature, women writers, and feminist literary theory, Harris has also come to discover over the past decade an interest specifically in the field of literature and medicine.<\/p>\n

\u201cI kept seeing these representations \u00a0of women physicians in the novels and realized that I didn\u2019t really know much about when women became physicians. So I started doing some research and became fascinated with it,\u201d she says. \u201cYou start looking at things and trying to get a sort of historical and cultural \u00a0perspective, and the next thing you know, you have a mass of materials.\u201d<\/p>\n

The result of her curiosity was Dr. Mary Walker: An American Radical<\/em> (Rutgers University Press, 2009), a critical biography focused on one of the nation\u2019s first female physicians and an activist for women\u2019s suffrage, one of four books Harris published in 2009 alone.<\/p>\n

For Harris, who in 2009 was also honored with the UConn Alumni Association\u2019s Excellence in Research Award for the Humanities, exploring archives, recovering early literature, and continuing to discover the past remain crucial to understanding our present and seeing the \u201cparallels from the 19th century to our own contemporary world.\u201d<\/p>\n

Within the classroom, Harris not only hopes to pass on her love for literary history and early women writers but also to challenge how students think about the past. \u201cWe don\u2019t know everything about the past. \u2026 We can continue to learn about it,\u201d she says. \u201cI think if we have that in mind, we\u2019re much more willing to also learn in the present\u2014to understand that those are connected.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ultimately, she says, \u201cWhatever we teach, our hope \u2026 is that we really want [students] to think critically. Not to say this is how you should think, but these are the skills you need to be able to question what you read or whatever commentaries you hear or whatever you\u2019re writing yourself.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

While working in the business world, Sharon Harris didn’t anticipate that the literature courses she was taking in the evening for fun would lead to a doctorate and a career in academia.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":43600,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_crdt_document":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[73],"class_list":["post-43463","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-04-12 13:53:50","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43463","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43463"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43463\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":44605,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43463\/revisions\/44605"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/43600"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43463"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43463"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43463"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=43463"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=43463"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}