Amizade Faculty Instructors
Name: Cari Carpenter
Instructor Biography: Cari Carpenter is an assistant professor in the English Department at West Virginia University. Cari holds a master's degree in English and a Ph.D. in English and women’s studies from the University of Michigan. After graduating, she spent two years as a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Kalamazoo College in southwest Michigan. She has lived and worked in many places, but the home closest to her heart is Colorado – whether Fort Collins, where she grew up, or Boulder, where she earned her undergraduate degree.
On the West Virginia University Campus, she is a core member of the Native American Studies Program and an affiliate of the Center for Women’s Studies. In 2008, she published the book Seeing Red: Anger, Sentimentality, and American Indians (Ohio State University Press). Cari has published articles on early American Indian women writers and feminist pedagogy, and she teaches classes in multiethnic and women’s literature.
One of her first loves—besides beagles, coffee, photography, and the outdoors—is travel, and she is ecstatic to teach some of her favorite literature in the country where it originates. She approaches all of her courses with the philosophy that the classroom—wherever it might be—should challenge, surprise, and invigorate each of its participants.