Taryn Okuma
Assistant Professor
Department of English
Catholic University of America
United States of America
Biography
Dr. Taryn Okuma joined the CUA faculty in 2009, and was previously Assistant Professor of English at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. She specializes in contemporary British fiction and her research interests include twentieth and twenty-first century British literature and culture, composition and pedagogy, literature of war and terror, postmodern fiction, and postcolonial and Anglophone literature. Dr. Okuma has presented and published scholarship on Henry Green, Evelyn Waugh, Kazuo Ishiguro, W. G. Sebald, T. S. Eliot, Pearl Buck, and college composition. Her work focuses on the connections between literature, history, and national/cultural identities. Additionally, Dr. Okuma is deeply invested in helping to shape the writing culture at CUA. In 2015 she proposed and helped to create Inventio: The Undergraduate Research Journal of The Catholic University of America, for which she also serves as faculty editor. In 2012 her interests in Writing Center research and pedagogy spurred her to create CUA’s first peer-tutoring program in the University Writing Center: the Writing Center Undergraduate Tutor Program. As the Director of the WCUT Program, Dr. Okuma trains undergraduates to work as tutors in the Writing Center and mentors them as they develop research projects. Through the WCUT Program, CUA students have presented their work at international and regional conferences. Strongly committed to teaching, Dr. Okuma seeks to enrich undergraduate study and provide mentorship for graduate students as they prepare to enter the profession. Dr. Okuma’s teaching has been recognized by various awards, including CUA Residential Life’s Faculty of the Month Award (October 2010) and the UW-Madison’s College of Letters and Science Teaching Fellow Award, University Early Excellence in Teaching Award, and induction into the UW Teaching Academy.
Research Interest
Modern and contemporary British literature and culture, Composition and pedagogy, Literature of war and terror,and Postcolonial and Anglophone literature.
Publications
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“Understanding Student Perceptions of the Writing Center: A Conversation between a Student, A Writing Center Instructor, and a Director/Professor.†Another Word. The Writing Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, 29 April 2013. Web.
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“Non-Combatancy, Narrative, and Henry Green’s Pack My Bag.†Great War Modernism: Artistic Response in the Context of War, 1914-1918, ed. Nanette Norris (Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2016) 61-72.
