Heather Steffen is an adjunct professor and core faculty member in the MA Program in the Engaged and Public Humanities, as well as an adjunct lecturer in the Writing Program at Georgetown. She teaches Introduction to the Public Humanities, Culture and Communicating for the Public Sphere, and Writing and Culture. Heather has taught writing at the first-year, advanced undergraduate, and graduate levels for twenty years. Her areas of expertise as a teacher are first-year writing, public writing, the public and engaged humanities, literatures and intellectual cultures of the long-twentieth century U.S., and U.S. higher education.
Heather’s research focuses on the intersections of labor and learning in and around U.S. colleges and universities, employing frameworks that derive from and contribute to critical, abolitionist, and decolonizing university studies. She writes about academic labor, student learning and research, graduate humanities education, and the study of higher education in the humanities. Her current book project, Useful Work: Imagining Academic Labor in the U.S. University, explores the values, meanings, and goals that academic workers bring to their teaching, research, service, and community engagement. Based on an analysis of 150 years of critical writing by professors and other workers, Heather’s book will present a new theory of academic labor in the U.S. research university.
Heather serves as advisory editor for Interspaces: A Home for the Engaged and Public Humanities, which she co-founded with the 2022 MA in ENPH cohort. This journal publishes writing by emerging authors and scholar-practitioners in the engaged and public humanities, the first of its kind to be led by a graduate-student editorial team. Heather also serves as assistant director of Faculty First Responders, an organization that supports academic workers attacked in right-wing media and develops webinars and workshops to educate workers about academic freedom and its defense.
Heather holds a PhD in literary and cultural studies from Carnegie Mellon University, where she taught first-year writing as a graduate student. Before coming to Georgetown, she held positions as a full-time lecturer in writing and part-time lecturer in English at UC Santa Barbara and as a postdoctoral researcher at UCSB and Rutgers.
Academic Appointment(s)
- Primary
- Adjunct Professor, Graduate School
- Secondary
- Adjunct Lecturer, Writing Program