As Director of Writing, Professor Meehan works with faculty and students on teaching and learning writing across the curriculum, and mentoring students in editing and publishing the Washington College Review, which publishes exemplary student writing that emerges from the core requirements of Washington College’s writing program. As a teacher of writing and literature and a co-director of the Cromwell Center for Teaching and Learning, Professor Meehan cultivates the art of inventive reading and thinking that Emerson locates in the rhetorical foundations of liberal education.
Every semester he teaches an English 101 course subtitled “The Gutenberg Progenies,” an exploration of the intersections of writing and technology from Frankenstein to Google. You can browse the course web site and blog (Comp\Post)to see what he and his students have been reading and writing. Other courses include American Environmental Writing, Introduction to Nonfiction, Transcendentalism, and The Art of Rhetoric, a new course that focuses on classical rhetoric and documentary film.
On campus, Professor Meehan has served on the Curriculum Committee, the Assessment Committee, and Tenure and Promotion, as well as chair of the Humanities division, chair of the Faculty Council, chair of the President’s Task Force on Safety, Social Media, and Campus Culture, and is a past president of Washington College’s chapter of the Phi Beta Kappa Society.
His scholarship focuses on the legacy and lessons of Ralph Waldo Emerson, America’s first public intellectual and arguably its greatest essayist. Emerson, he contends, remains an important voice for articulating the values of liberal education, particularly of the sort thriving in small liberal arts colleges such as Washington College. He has recently published two books on Emerson: Approaches to Teaching the Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (2018) and A Liberal Education in Late Emerson: Readings in the Rhetoric of Mind (2019). His work in progress, Against Originality, takes as its point of departure Emerson’s late essay “Quotation and Originality” to reclaim the creative significance of unorginality across the arts and sciences.
Education
- Ph.D. English, University of Iowa, 2002.
- M.A. English, SUNY Buffalo, 1996.
- A.B. English, Princeton University, 1991.
