Lesley Yoder
Lecturer
Contact
100 Bay State Road, Room 310
617-358-1538
layoder@bu.edu
Spring Office Hours
Tuesday 2:15-3:15 p.m.
Wednesday 12-1 p.m.
Thursday 2:15-3:15 p.m.
Education
2011 Ph.D. Boston University (French Language and Literature)
2001 M.A. Bowling Green State University (French Language and Literature)
1998 B.A. Ohio Wesleyan University (English Literature; French)
Bio
Dr. Yoder is a freelance writer, copyeditor, and translator who teaches courses to native and non-native English speakers. Her writing seminar on the tortured poet takes a pluralistic and revisionist approach to the clichéd image of the tortured artist as a self-indulged, brooding, suicidal miscreant. This course continues to inspire and inform Dr. Yoder’s own scholarly research into the French literary figure of the poète maudit, even prompting her 2011 doctoral dissertation on Alfred de Vigny’s Chatterton. Her ESL writing seminar, titled “Lost in Translation,” asks students to enter into ongoing debates within the field of translation studies, such as literal v. free translation, foreignization v. domestication, film subtitling and dubbing, and machine translation. Both of Dr. Yoder’s writing seminars encourage self- and cultural awareness by demanding that students reflect upon preexisting ideas regarding the Self and Other, language, and cultural difference. As of Fall 2012, she also teaches WR 098: Introduction to College Reading & Writing in English.
Other research interests include: French Romantic literature, particularly poetry and the drame romantique; the slippery relationship between the poet and the Maternal; letters and the journal intime; psychoanalytic, feminist, and gender theory; translation studies.
Dr. Yoder is also a nationally recognized calligrapher who has collaborated with Cartolina Cards and American Greetings.