Mary assumed the position of departmental chair in the summer of 2004.  Since joining the faculty in 1989, she has frequently taught general education Rhetoric courses and has often served as a faculty leader in the department’s Professional Development Program.  She has taught several First-Year Seminars, as well as advanced undergraduate courses in nonfiction writing and the politics of literacy.  She regularly offers graduate courses in Feminist Ethics and Feminist Pedagogy.

Mary’s teaching and scholarship converge in the fields of relational ethics, feminist pedagogy, writing centers and writing-across-the curriculum.  She has worked with Carol Severino to develop an undergraduate peer tutoring program called Writing Fellows, as part of an effort to support writing instruction across the curriculum.  She presently serves as a commenting mentor in the Writing Fellows Program.

In addition, Mary is at work on a project that examines the attribution of “personhood” to nonhuman creatures, particularly attributions that arise from the fields of ape-language research and animal cognition.  This fall she is developing this project as a participant in the Obermann Interdisciplinary Faculty Research Seminar, “Articulating the Animal.”  In the spring of 2006 she is scheduled to share her interest in this topic with Honors students in an Honors seminar titled “Humans and Other Primates.”