Professional Profile
Melanie Brown, Assistant Professor of English, is Director of the Writing Center and Writing Across the Curriculum at St. Norbert College. She teaches ID 100 College Writing, Engl 150 Introduction to Literature, Engl 305 Literary Theory and Writing and other courses in writing and literature.

Her teaching and research interests include 19th and 20th century U.S. literature; the scholarship of teaching and learning; writing center and writing across the curriculum pedagogies; and history of the book, a relatively new field in literary and American studies that explores material and marketplace issues in publishing, readers’ receptions of and relationships to books over time, and the value and place of books in U.S. culture, an especially fruitful inquiry in this age of electronic media.

Her current research projects focus on tutoring pedagogy and on the educational value of the Little Blue Books, a series of five-cent, paper-covered books that sold hundreds of millions of copies from 1919 to 1978 but are generally unknown today.

She has published essays about literature and teaching and has taught interdisciplinary writing courses, U.S. literature surveys, and a J-term course called “American Bestsellers.