Nan is the Senior Global Fellow, teaching one semester at Duke each year, while traveling to China once a year to teach advanced research and writing at Duke Kunshan University. Nan took this position with the TWP in the summer of 2016 after having taught Writing 101 and Writing in the Disciplines for five years. Nan earned her PhD in History from the State University of New York at Albany in 2009, with a concentration in nineteenth-century American gender and cultural history. Her first book, Staging Family, Mid-Nineteenth-Century American Actresses’ Domestic Deceptions, is coming out this summer 2017 with the University of Nebraska Press’s Women’s History Series. Staging Family examines the domestic rhetoric used in actresses’ public discourse to mask the fact that they lived radically non-domestic lives. The study includes the professional and personal lives of almost 60 female thespians from the mid-1830’s to 1970.
Nan enjoys designing innovative curriculum and her Writing 101 and History classes have ranged from Gender History to Children’s History to Cultural Anthropology to Public History and Museum Studies. One of her favorite courses, “The Pet Connection: Human Relationships with Domesticated Animals," developed into a service learning course. Students volunteered at Durham’s Animal Protection Society for a minimum of 30 hours over the semester, helping to socialize, exercise, and train dogs and cats, promoting their chances for adoption. Nan is currently adapting this course to teach in China.
Historian and Academic delineate Nan’s second career. Previously she acted, directed, and acting coached at regional theaters throughout the country. Last summer she starred as Hester in City of Conversation at Oldcastle Theatre in Vermont, as well as directing Brighton Beach Memoirs at Curtain Call Theatre in New York. She is a proud member of three unions: Actors Equity, Screen Actor’s Guild, and the American Federation of Television and Radio. Currently she is adapting some of her book manuscript into a four-person play. Nan expresses her tremendous gratitude to Duke and the Thompson Writing Program for giving her the opportunity to continually to develop as a teacher and writer.
