Connie Steel

Connie joins the Life Worth Living Initiative in conjunction with the Poorvu Center for Teaching and Learning’s Education and Program Assessment team. Her role includes building evaluation plans for an international network of faculty, designing and implementing professional development for teaching, and developing data management systems to track and report on longitudinal outcomes. Connie earned a doctorate in English with specialization in the History of Rhetoric at the University of Texas at Austin. She was awarded a Mellon Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) Fellowship at Carnegie Mellon’s Eberly Center, and a Social Science Research Council (SSRC) Pre-Dissertation Development Fellowship. Her research interests include the poetics of the term ‘human rights’ in English anti-slave trade campaigns and the theological aesthetic tensions of monuments to Scottish Covenanter martyrs. Connie’s ten years’ experience in program management includes faculty development and graduate student mentorship for core and writing flag courses. Her teaching in the humanities spans offerings such as “Life Worth Living,” “Intro to Reading, Writing, and Research,” “Rhetoric of American Identity: Gender, Race, Ethnicity,” “Principles of Rhetoric,” and “Literature and Artificial Intelligence.”