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DR. PATRICIA DUNLAVY VALENTI

Professor Email: patricia.valenti@uncp.edu Phone: 910.521.6430 Office: Dial Humanities 115 Areas: American and Women's Literature, English Education Home Page: www.uncp.edu/home/valenti/

EDUCATION

Ph.D., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
M.A., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
B.A., Marymount College, Tarrytown, NY

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

Dr. Valenti believes that students learn very differently from each other so she plans courses and individual classes to accommodate each learning style. Her students participate in various kinds of discussion, perform individual and group research projects, listen to lectures and presentations, work with computer technology, read texts, view film, and write about literature for a variety of audiences and purposes. Her students explore literature through analytical, historical/biographical, audience-centered, mimetic, and generic approaches. In 2002, Dr. Valenti published Understanding The Old Man and the Sea: A Student Casebook to Issues, Sources, and Historical Documents for the Greenwood Press “Literature in Context” series, a book that reflects her pedagogical principles. She was the recipient of the University of North Carolina 2004 Board of Governors’ Award for Excellence in Teaching.

Dr. Valenti's scholarship and publication generally focus on nineteenth-century American authors (especially those of the American Renaissance, Nathaniel Hawthorne and his family in particular), women writers, and biography. She has edited Sophia Peabody Hawthorne's American Note-books and provided on-camera scholarly commentary for The Scarlet Letter CD ROM (Southern Star Interactive 1997). Dr. Valenti pursues the craft of biography, both in items for the DLB and other biographical dictionaries and encyclopedias as well as in book-length works. She has published To Myself a Stranger: A Biography of Rose Hawthorne Lathrop (Louisiana State University Press 1991). Her book Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, A Life, Volume I, 1809-1847 (University of Missouri Press, 2004) was supported by a year-long fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Some of the questions which govern her research are: How can we know another's life? How do we determine fact? How does one's gender or class or race affect a life? a work of art? What is the real-world significance of a particular scholarly endeavor?

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