Elizabeth Toohey joined Principia’s English Department in 2003, where she teaches film, gender studies, and U.S. and postcolonial literature, and currently serves as department chair. She earned her doctorate in English, with an interdisciplinary certificate in Women’s Studies, from the Graduate Center at the City University of New York (CUNY). She writes book reviews on film studies, women’s studies, and American culture for The Christian Science Monitor.

Her dissertation, Bodies and Beliefs, focuses on religious identity in American women’s postwar fiction and its intersection with race, gender, and sexuality. Recent conference papers include “The Visitor: Self-Actualization, Globalization and the Ghost of 9-11,” for the panel “In the Wake of 9/11: American Texts in the Twenty-First Century;” “The Class: The Empire Strikes Back” for the panel “Paris in Focus: Films, Texts and Contexts;” and “Teaching African Fiction” for the panel “Postcolonial Feminist Studies.”

As a doctoral candidate, she was awarded a fellowship to initiate a Writing Across the Curriculum program with a small team of fellows at Lehman College, and led writing workshops as a communications consultant at Baruch College. She was the recipient of a grant from the New York Council for the Humanities to create the program “Rethinking Religion: Recent Women’s Literature and American Identity” at the Brooklyn Public Library. Her research has been supported by the Helena Rubinstein and Winchester foundations, and by fellowships from the City University of New York.

Dr. Toohey’s publications include “Emma and the Countryside: Weather and a Place for a Walk” in Persuasions: The Jane Austen Journal and contributions to the Encyclopedia of Women’s Autobiography. Publications in progress include “Revisiting the Visitor: Mourning, Surveillance and the Ghost of 9-11” and “Dressing Up: Religious Passing and Gender Performance in Allegra Goodman’s Paradise Park and Louise Erdich’s The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse.”