Jaclyn Amoroso

Jaclyn has been a full-time lecturer with the Writing and Critical Inquiry Program since 2013. She has a master's degree in English from The College of Saint Rose, where she also worked for several years as the Director of the Writing Center.  

Jaclyn works to encourage sustained reflection and inquiry in her WCI students as they try to make sense of their own experiences and the world around them in their writing and research. 

Jaclyn currently serves as a co-director for WCI’s Peer Mentor Program. In this role, she helps former WCI students develop the leadership and communication skills they’ll need to help first-year students adjust to the academic expectations of college-level writing, research, reading and inquiry. 

Research Interests: First-year writing, the American Dream in literature, American identity in literature, the role of multicultural literature in the secondary English classroom

Course Description: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie emphasizes in her TED Talk, “The Danger of a Single Story,” that “Stories matter. Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign, but stories can also be used to empower and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that broken dignity.” Using excerpts from this text and others to guide our study, in our course we will first reflect on the stories about others and ourselves that we have told and have been told. We will explore how these stories raise larger questions for us about our society and ourselves.  These questions may focus on issues of identity, relationships, culture, etc. With the goal of better understanding the complexity of our questions, we will conduct some research. What have others written about regarding these questions? We will then finish the semester by responding to this research and offering our own informed perspectives as we enter into academic conversations about the topics.  

Pronouns: She/her/hers