About Me

Betsy Verhoeven is the writing coordinator, providing guidance for the teaching of writing in first-year seminars and in writing intensive courses. An Associate Professor of English, she teaches composition and rhetoric, including first-year seminar classes and upper-division courses in professional and civic writing, publishing, American identity, and environmentalism.

Verhoeven recently completed a grant project in the National Endowment for the Humanities Connections program, which seeks to expand the role of the humanities in undergraduate education at two- and four-year institutions by encouraging partnerships between humanities faculty and their counterparts in other areas of study. She was the Principal Investigator for Promoting Civil Discourse in a Polarizing World, working with Dr. Emma Fleck in Marketing and Dr. Nick Clark in Political Science. She has published recently on the power of storytelling in Marketing and on the intersection between liberal arts education and preparation for life after college. In her classes and in her research, she studies the way texts (in the workplace, politics, art, and entertainment) shape our worldviews and values, often in the hope of finding common ground between otherwise opposed groups and of broadening the spectrum of inclusion in our democratic processes.

Courses Taught