Department of English

 

Heather Ostman is an Assistant Professor and the Assistant Chair of the Westchester Community College English Department, where she teaches courses in writing and literature. She holds a Ph.D. in English from Fordham University. Her research has primarily focused on rhetoric and women’s literature, and her work has appeared in academic journals including College Composition and Communication, Women’s Studies, Prose Studies, Philological Quarterly, New Writing, among others. She is the editor of Kate Chopin in the Twenty-First Century: New Critical Essays (2008) and the author of Writing Program Administration and the Community College, which will be published in 2012. She is the recipient of the SUNY Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activities and the WCC Foundation Faculty Excellence Award in Scholarship. She has presented conference papers on composition studies and the written works of several women authors and activists, including Kate Chopin, Emma Goldman, Jane Addams, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. Dr. Ostman is also the co-founder and president of the Kate Chopin International Society.

Before joining the Westchester Community College English faculty in the fall of 2007, she taught writing and literature at Iona College in New Rochelle, NY, and later at the Manhattan Metropolitan Center of SUNY Empire State College, where she served as Faculty Chair and Writing Program Coordinator.