Dr. Summer Pennell, 2009 M.A. graduate of the University of Oregon Folklore Program, has been hired as Assistant Professor of English Education in the Department of English and Linguistics at Truman State University in Missouri.

During her master’s program at UO, Dr. Pennell was interested in doing outreach and educational programming and originally planned on working for a museum or community organization. Her master’s thesis was a lesbian-themed Indonesian shadow puppet performance, with a focus on the performance as a form of public education and outreach. Upon graduation, Dr. Pennell entered an alternative licensure program and became a high school English teacher in rural North Carolina. She loved teaching, but was dismayed by heteronormative and homophobic cultures and practices that harmed both herself and her queer students. This experience lead Dr. Pennell to find her true passion in education and social justice, and after two years in the classroom she entered a PhD in Education program at UNC-Chapel Hill, in a strand called Culture, Curriculum and Change. Dr. Pennell also took a course in UNC’s folklore department on collaborative ethnography, and did an independent study with her favorite folklorist, Elaine Lawless, when she was a visiting faculty member here. Dr. Pennell goals were to improve schooling experiences for LGBTQ students, teachers and families, and that has remained the driving force that permeates all of her research.

According to Dr. Pennell, “My folklore training informs all that I do. My research is qualitative and primarily ethnographic, which I learned first at UO. I also think folklore gave me a drive to study and celebrate things on the margin, and this has continued in my work in education. The mainstream has enough attention- I want to celebrate the people, places, and subjects on the outside.”

This fall Dr. Pennell will be teaching an LGBTQ YA literature course. Truman has a folklore minor housed in her department.  Dr. Pennell will teach a folklore methods class and is planning a class that combines folklore research methods with new literacies, which is “a fancy way of saying I want to teach a class on daily documentation processes like instagram and snapchat.” Dr. Pennell cites Dr. Lisa Gilman, who was her advisor at UO, as a primary and ongoing influence. “I really enjoyed both her Folklore & Gender and Folklore & Sexuality classes at UO,” says Dr. Pennell, “they have continued to be influential to my current work.”