mitch boucher, lecturer

Before joining the UWW faculty, Mitch Boucher taught as a Lecturer for the Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies Department at UMass Amherst and as an Adjunct faculty member in English at Holyoke Community College and UMass Amherst. Mitch has taught courses in literature of the United States, sexuality studies, queer theory, American studies, and gay and lesbian history, as well as first-Year, junior-level, and experimental writing.

His goal as a teacher is to create a supportive, yet challenging learning environment where students pursue their own scholarly interests while critically engaging with the knowledge that is produced and circulates through our social institutions and cultural environments.

Mitch is a board member of the Sexual Minorities Education Foundation, a local community archives of GLBTQ history, activism, art, and literature. Outside of UWW, Mitch treasures time spent with his partner and five year old child.

educational background

B.A., English with minor in Women’s Studies, Eastern Connecticut State University
M.A., English, Ohio University
Ph.D., English with Concentration in American Studies, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Graduate Certificate in Advanced Feminist Studies, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

teaching and research interests

Cultural representations of race, class, gender, sexuality; twentieth-century United States literature and history; cultural studies; social justice movements; gay and lesbian history; queer theory; gender and sexuality studies.

publications

Mitch work has been published in numerous journals, including Composition Studies and New Directions in Teaching and Learning, as well as in the recent anthology Performing American Masculinities: The 21st-Century Man in Popular Culture (Ed. Elwood Watson & Marc E. Shaw, Indiana UP, 2010). He's currently working on a book, entitled “You Look Very Authentic”: Transgender Representation and the Politics of the ‘Real’ in Contemporary United States Culture.

draws inspiration from

The academy is not paradise. But learning is a place where paradise can be created. The classroom with all its limitations remains a location of possibility. In that field of possibility we have the opportunity to labor for freedom, to demand of ourselves and our comrades, an openness of mind and heart that allows us to face reality even as we collectively imagine ways to move beyond boundaries, to transgress. This is education as the practice of freedom.

- bell hooks