Kathryn Strong Hansen

Colby College · Center for Teaching and Learning

Greater emphasis on ethical issues is needed in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education. The fiction for specific purposes (FSP) approach, using optimistic science fiction texts, offers a way to focus on ethical reflection that capitalizes on role models rather than negative examples. This article discusses the benefits o...

In this chapter, I argue that, despite initially seeming to resist traditional ideas, Eoin Colfer's Artemis Fowl book series constructs a fantasy world that reinforces hidebound notions of gender and sexuality as well as of race, all of which these books interconnect. To do so, I first outline the conditions that raise the possibility that the Arte...

While Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games trilogy explicitly includes Greco-Roman references, this essay argues that the trilogy also implicitly invokes the myths of Artemis and of Philomela. In obliquely referencing these mythic women, The Hunger Games provides its protagonist, Katniss Everdeen, with different possible paths of femininity that she can...

Writers of fiction capitalize upon dress’s potential as an agent of deception, using clothing as a means through which characters control their identity to perpetuate lies. Eliza Haywood’s Fantomina; or, Love in a Maze (1725) contains this type of heroine, and the novella shows dress can provide women with power that they can find in few other aren...

Race in Young Adult Speculative Fiction offers a sustained, cogent analysis of race and representation in young adult speculative fiction (YASF). The collection considers how characters of color are represented in YASF, how they contribute to and participate in speculative worlds, how race affects or influences the structures of speculative worlds,...

Sir Terry Pratchett’s March 2015 death put a period on a life filled not only with the production of fantasy fiction, but also with dedication to raising awareness about dementia, an affliction from which he suffered. Pratchett’s life was manifestly one shaped by both the pleasures of fiction and ethical imperatives. Fittingly, Caroline Webb’s Fant...

Austen scholars may have spent a few minutes—or hours—exploring the “What Jane Saw” website (http://www.whatjanesaw.org) over its launch weekend in May of 2013. Two hundred years after Jane Austen attended an art exhibit at the British Institution in London on May 23, 1813, an e-gallery became accessible, recreating the first retrospective of the w...

This article describes a classroom activity that increases students’ connection to literary characters, and by extension, texts. The activity, constructed as a party attended by literary characters, tasks students with taking on the point of view of one character in an assigned novel. This can encourage a student to see the viewpoint of a character...