Clare Callahan, Ph.D.

Clare Callahan is a community-engaged teacher and scholar of American literature, Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Black Studies, poverty and working-class studies, and health humanities. She develops cross-disciplinary initiatives and facilitates co-curricular programming in and beyond the university.

An assistant professor of English at Elon University and an adjunct instructor with the Focus program at Duke University, Dr. Callahan received her Ph.D. in English from Duke in 2016, with certificates in feminist studies and in college teaching, and a B.A. in English and anthropology from the University of Texas at Austin in 2005.

Her research focuses on depictions in twentieth century American literature of poor and working-class women’s creative survival strategies. She also studies representations of women’s health in contemporary U.S. fiction, which will form the basis of her second book.

Dr. Callahan has worked on various humanities initiatives. While at the Humanities Institute at the University of Texas at Austin, she secured an NEH Digital Projects for the Public grant to collect and digitally curate community health narratives from underserved communities in central Texas to promote health literacy. This work has informed her community-engaged teaching; she is currently partnering with non-profit organizations serving low-income communities in central North Carolina.