PeopleFaculty

Faculty Coordinator for Writing in the English Majors and Professional Writing Minor
Kaplan 232
Tel: 310.825.4173 / Fax: 310.267.4339 / E-mail

Education
B.A. Brown University 1995
MPhil University of Oxford 1998
DPhil University of Oxford 2003

Interests

Dr. Stephan teaches a broad range of courses on nineteenth-century literatures, with particular concentration on gender and authorship, including courses on the nineteenth-century novel, nineteenth-century critical prose, forms of the Gothic in nineteenth-century British popular literature, and the works of the Brontë sisters.  She also teaches a variety of upper-division writing courses, including new courses on critical and professional writing in the English majors.

Additional Information

After completing her DPhil at Oxford University in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, Dr. Stephan began her teaching career as an English and writing instructor in private high schools, first in New York City and then in Los Angeles, where she taught courses focused on composition and a broad range of literatures in English.  Since joining the faculty of UCLA’s English Department in 2012, Dr. Stephan has focused her teaching on the literatures of the nineteenth century, with special emphasis on women and writing, and on critical writing in academia and in the workplace. Her experience working with high school students who were transitioning to colleges and universities has given her a unique perspective for working with new UCLA English majors and transfer students.

Since fall 2017 Dr. Stephan has served as Faculty Coordinator for Writing in the English Majors.  In that role, she develops, teaches, and oversees the 110 series of discipline-specific writing courses for UCLA English majors, which includes a suite of courses dedicated to advancing the students’ analytical writing skills and preparing them for their postgraduate careers. In 2018 she originated and introduced into the undergraduate curriculum two new courses for the series.  “Public Readers, Public Writers: Writing about Books for a 21^st Century Audience” (110C) aims to teach students the art and craft of the book review with a focus on the what, why, and how of literary criticism for a general (rather than for a specifically academic) audience. “Variable Topics in Professional Writing” (110V) will allow English Department faculty to design their own courses for the new minor. Among her other roles as the Coordinator for Writing in the Majors, Dr. Stephan designs and supervises fall orientations and supplements the training of new faculty teaching in the 110 series. Dr. Stephan’s teaching was recognized in fall 2017 with a Mellon/EPIC (Excellence in Pedagogy and Innovative Classrooms) fellowship, for which she participated in a series of seminars devoted to teaching excellence.

Since 2017, Dr. Stephan has also been serving as one of the lead architects for the English Department’s new Professional Writing Minor and will serve as the department’s coordinator for the new minor. In collaboration with Writing Programs, this new English minor—which will offer core courses on such topics as digital writing and web literacy, business and entrepreneurship, and nonprofits and public engagement, as well as a menu of discipline-specific electives drawn from departments throughout the university—aims to prepare students for the written, oral, and multimodal communications of their postgraduate workplaces.  The Professional Writing Minor will launch Spring quarter 2019.

Dr. Stephan serves as an ex officio member of the English Department’s Undergraduate Committee; a member of the department’s undergraduate Marathon Reading Committee, which supports the work of graduate students who organize this annual fundraising event; and a member of the department’s Alumni Outreach Committee, whose purpose is to develop sustained relationships between the department and its graduates, and which in 2018 established a new speaker series for undergraduate and graduate students featuring recent English Department alumni.  She has also continued her work with secondary school students as a regular volunteer at 826LA, a Los Angeles-based writing and literacy non-profit, for which she wrote and edited training manuals and continues to help students from underserved Los Angeles high schools draft and revise their personal statements for college applications.

Her essays and reviews have been published in print and online in such places as the Daily Telegraph (UK), Avidly (a Los Angeles Review of Books-associated website), and Public Books, a digital magazine that brings essays and interviews by scholars to an audience beyond the academy.  She also contributed sixty articles on nineteenth-century literary figures, including ten original articles and fifty revisions, to the Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press).

Interest Areas
• British Literature & Culture, 19th C. – Present
• Sexuality & Gender Studies