B.A., Wesleyan University (Art History) Ph.D., Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY) (English; Women’s Studies certificate)
Elizabeth Toohey taught English and Women’s Studies at Lehman College (N.Y.) and Drew University (Madison, N.J.), prior to joining Principia’s faculty in 2003.At Lehman, she was awarded a fellowship to initiate a Writing Across the Curriculum program with a small team of fellows in 2000-2002.There she worked with the Education and Geography departments and conducted faculty workshops on writing and pedagogy. She has also led faculty and student workshops as a consultant to Baruch College through the Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute (2002-2003).
She earned her doctorate from the Graduate Center at the City University of New York (CUNY) in 2006.Her research focuses on religious identity in postwar fiction, and its intersection with race, gender and sexuality.She has recently presented papers on Flannery O’Connor at the Rocky Mountain and South Central Modern Language Associations, and on the native-American writer, Louise Erdrich, at the Midwest Modern Language Association.She is a recipient of a grant from the New York Council for the Humanities, which enabled her to create and lead the program“Rethinking Religion: Recent Women's Literature and American Identity” at the Brooklyn Public Library (2003).She has also participated in the Conviction Project through an award from CUNY's Women's Studies Department, which brought together scholars with women who had been in prison to help them work toward college and graduate degrees (2002–03). Her research has been supported by the Helena Rubinstein and Winchester foundations, and by university fellowships from the City University of New York.
Recent publications include “Emma and the Countryside: Weather and a Place for a Walk” in Persuasions: The Jane Austen Journal (1999), and contributions to the Encyclopedia of Women's Autobiography (Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc., 2005).As a gallery assistant at the Galerie St. Etienne, N.Y. (1994-1997), she has collaborated as a curator of exhibitions on German and Austrian Expressionism and contemporary illustration, including “The Fractured Form: Expressionism and the Human Body,” “From Left to Right: Social Realism in Germany and Russia,” “Artists of the Weimar Era: Hannah Hoch, Kathe Kollwitz, Jeanne Mammen,” “The Wild Party: Drawings by Art Spiegelman,” and “Drawn to Text: Co-mix Artists as Illustrators.”
