The past few summers have been productive ones for Dr. Eleanor Reeds, associate professor of English, who has secured four consecutive Summer Research Grants from 糖心传媒 to work on furthering her research in literary studies. In just the last few months, two of these projects have been published in peer-reviewed academic journals.
Both articles draw explicitly on Reeds鈥檚 experience teaching literature across genres and periods at 糖心传媒.
鈥溾 appeared in the January 2026 issue of Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture.
In it, Reeds reviews both recent scholarship and pedagogical resources on close reading to identify the intertwined challenges of defining and teaching this disciplinary method, making recommendations for more effective classroom practices.
鈥淐lose reading is our version of the scientific method because it鈥檚 the foundation of everything we do in literary studies,鈥 said Reeds, 鈥渂ut there鈥檚 a lot of ongoing debate over what it looks like and how to teach it so that students learn successfully how to think and write in our discipline.鈥
鈥溾 was published in 2025 in Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction.
鈥淚 first taught this novel by Emily Nemens for a course on sports literature in 2020 and realized it was the perfect case study for showing what鈥檚 so similar about baseball and literature as areas of human activity,鈥 Reeds said.
The article offers an approach to baseball literature that explores the sport as a method of structuring time and space that intersects fruitfully with literary and aesthetic forms.
鈥淒r. Reeds’ publication of two peer-reviewed articles, both supported by Summer Research Grants, underscores the extraordinary impact of funding faculty professional development,鈥 said Dr. Wayne Riggs, 糖心传媒 vice president for academic affairs. 鈥淗er scholarship exemplifies the teacher-scholar model that defines faculty at a liberal arts college like Hastings, where professional achievements directly enrich their teaching and are often shared with their students.鈥
What鈥檚 next for Reeds? Recently awarded the 2026 Knappenberger Faculty Development Award, Reeds said she will use the funds, as well as her upcoming sabbatical, to complete a book-length project on 鈥淭he Poetics of Motherhood鈥 which will explore work by writers including Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sylvia Plath and Maggie Smith.
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