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 earned a Ph.D. in English from Fordham University in 2004. Her dissertation and subsequent research and published work have focused on rhetoric and women’s literature. In particular, her work has been largely focused on how women use language to foster and/or represent social change. She has a forthcoming article, “Maternal Rhetoric in Jane Addams’s Twenty Years at Hull-House,” in Philological Quarterly and an edited collection of essays, Kate Chopin in the Twenty-First Century: New Critical Essays, which will be published by Cambridge Scholars Press in 2008. She has delivered papers on rhetorical strategies and the autobiographies of several women activists, including Emma Goldman, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, among others. Dr. Ostman is also the co-founder and president of the Kate Chopin International Society (www.katechopin.org).

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 the Writing Program Coordinator.