College of Liberal Arts

Anita Helle  was the founding Director of the School of Writing, Literature, and Film from 2011-2015, and Director of the CLA Center for Teaching, Learning, and Research from 1999-2002.  At OSU since 1991, she has received the Burlington Northern University Teaching Award, the College of Liberal Arts Robert Frank Research and Creativity Award and the G. Warren Hovland Award for Service.   Research and teaching interests include 20th/21st century American women writers,  mid-20th century poetry and the lyric tradition,  feminist theory, literacy and pedagogy, and the rhetoric and poetics of illness narrative.  Her publications include essays in American Literary Scholarship, American Literature, College Composition and Communication, Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, and Literature and Medicine. She has written extensively on the poetry of Sylvia Plath and archival material work, including The Unraveling Archive: Essays on Sylvia Plath (University of Michigan Press 2007/2008), and in Representing Sylvia Plath (Cambridge University Press, 2010).  She is affiliate faculty in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and the  Medical Humanities Certificate Program. Her recent publication includes a special double issue of Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature  (2015) on breast cancer narrative, theory, and memory, and a study of the poet Anne Sexton's photographic self-fashioning (2016).