Professor Begins New Chapter at Westmont

Kathryn Stelmach always knew she wanted to be a teacher. The new Westmont English professor and Carlsbad native says she was deeply influenced by her maternal grandparents, who both taught high school English.

“Growing up, I would sit in my grandfather’s chair and read his dog-eared poetry. I really fell in love with it,” she says.

Kathryn graduated from Centre College in Danville, Ky., and received a master’s degree and doctorate from UCLA. She taught at UCLA and Pitzer College in Claremont before coming to Westmont.

Stelmach is committed to the liberal arts and says teaching at Westmont is her dream job.

“I think the liberal arts are so important because we’re exposing students to all aspects of what it means to be human,” she says, “not just in a narrow vocational sense, but really in a wide-ranging exposure to the humanities and the sciences and the social sciences. Along the way we hope our students will become better critical readers, writers and thinkers.”

At UCLA, Stelmach won the Chancellor’s Dissertation Fellowship and the Teaching Excellence Award.

Stelmach says she has always been a voracious reader, enjoying “Alice in Wonderland” in the third grade and “Gone with the Wind” in the fourth grade.

Stelmach has contributed reviews and articles to scholarly journals, including “Dead Deirdre? Myth and Morality in the Irish Literary Revival” in Celtic Studies Association of North America Yearbook and “From Text to Tableau: Ekphrastic Enchantment in ‘Mrs. Dalloway’ and ‘To the Lighthouse’” in Studies in the Novel.

Her research explores the transatlantic and diasporic intersections between the literatures of Ireland, Africa, the Caribbean, and the American South. She looks forward to her article, “‘A child of this century’: Juvenilia in the Short Fiction of Eudora Welty and Elizabeth Bowen,” being published next year in “Lost Colonies: Ireland and the American South.”