Faculty/Staff Detail

Danica Savonick is Assistant Professor of English. Her teaching and research analyze the intersections among twentieth-century and contemporary U.S. literature and culture; feminist aesthetics and poetics; critical race, gender, and sexuality studies; and student-centered pedagogy. She received her Ph.D. in English and a Certificate in American Studies from the CUNY Graduate Center, where she was a Futures Initiative Fellow and a HASTAC Scholar, and a recipient of a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship, a Woodrow Wilson Dissertation Fellowship in Women’s Studies, and the AAC&U K. Patricia Cross Future Leaders Award.

 

Savonick is currently working on a book manuscript titled Insurgent Knowledge: The Poetics and Pedagogy of Toni Cade Bambara, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, and Adrienne Rich in the Era of Open Admissions, which analyzes the reciprocal relationship of pedagogy and writing in the work of these authors, all of whom taught in the Search for Education, Elevation, and Knowledge (SEEK) educational opportunity program at the City University of New York in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Drawing on archival research as well as Bambara, Jordan, Lorde, and Rich’s published work, Savonick shows how feminist aesthetics have shaped U.S. education and how, conversely, classroom encounters with students have had a lasting impact on postwar literature and theory. Above all, Insurgent Knowledge argues that aesthetic education has been central to processes of social change and that, through pedagogy, we can contest the privatization of knowledge and power that now dominates educational practice.

 

Prior to teaching at SUNY Cortland, Savonick taught in the English Department at Queens College, CUNY. 

Education

Ph.D., English, CUNY Graduate Center
M.A, English, CUNY Graduate Center
B.A., English, Rutgers University

Teaching

Publications

Manuscript

Insurgent Knowledge: The Poetics and Pedagogy of Toni Cade Bambara, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, and Adrienne Rich in the Era of Open Admissions

Articles

“Write Out Loud: Risk and Reward in Digital Publishing,” Hybrid Pedagogy (November 2017).

“Building a Student-Centered (Digital) Learning Community with Undergraduates,” co-authored with Lisa Tagliaferri. Digital Humanities Quarterly 11.3 (2017). 

“Changing the Subject: Adrienne Rich and the Poetics of Activist Pedagogy,” American Literature, special issue on “Pedagogy: Critical Practices for a Changing World” 89.2 (2017): 305-329.

“‘The Problem of Locomotion’: Infrastructure and Automobility in Three Postcolonial Urban Nigerian Novels,” Modern Fiction Studies 61.4 (2015): 669-689.

Chapters

“Collaboration,” co-authored with Katina Rogers and Amanda Licastro. Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: Concepts, Models, and Experiments. Ed. Matthew K. Gold, Rebecca Frost Davis, Kathy Harris, Jentery Sayers. Forthcoming from Modern Language Association 2018. 

“Digital Humanities: The Role of Interdisciplinary Humanities in the Information Age,” coauthored with Cathy N. Davidson.The Oxford Handbook of Interdisciplinarity Second Edition, Ed. Robert Frodeman, Julie Thompson Klein, Robert Carlos Dos Santos Pacheco (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 159-171.

Special Issues

"Teaching with Archives," special issue co-editor, The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy, forthcoming 2018. 

Other Publications 

“Timekeeping as Feminist Pedagogy.” Inside Higher Ed, June 27, 2017.

“Gender Bias in Academe: An Annotated Bibliography of Important Recent Studies.” Co-authored with Cathy N. Davidson.HASTAC.org & London School of Economics Social Science Impact Blog, January 26, 2015.

“Because nothing is sufficient, we must use everything.” Critical Ethnic Studies. August 31, 2015.