Engagement at Geva

ABOUT:

Elizabeth Johnston Ambrose (she/her) is a Rochester-based scholar noted for her cross-disciplinary contributions to the fields of Eighteenth-Century Studies, Romanticism, Gender Studies, and Popular Culture. With an academic and creative focus on literary and cultural representations of female rivalry, maternity, monstrosity, and gender-based violence, her writing appears in journals like The Atlantic, Women Studies Quarterly, and Feminist Formations, as well as in edited collections such as Bad Girls and Transgressive Women in Popular Television, Fiction, and Film (Palgrave, 2017), The Cambridge Guide to the Eighteenth-Century Novel (Cambridge, 2019), and Trauma-Informed Pedagogy: Addressing Gender-Based Violence in the Classroom (Emerald,2022). A Professor at Monroe Community College since 2003, Elizabeth holds a PhD in English Literature from West Virginia University and teaches courses in British Literature, Women’s Writing, Women in Popular Culture, and Girls Studies. For over a decade, she has also taught writing therapy classes at the Rochester Breast Cancer Coalition. She is the recipient of several teaching awards, including The SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching (2014) and The SUNY Traveling Lecturer Award (2017), the latter of which took her to Russia to guest-lecture on Medusa and Barbie at St. Petersburg State University and Novgorod University. Winner of the 2021 Rattle Chapbook Poetry Prize, she is currently at work on a full-length memoir about growing up in the evangelical church. Elizabeth is a founding member of the four-woman group Straw Mat Writers and lives in Rochester with her husband, two daughters, and four rescue animals.