Rachel Fomalhaut

Lecturer, Writing
Office: Smiddy Hall 406, Ithaca, NY 14850

Rachel Fomalhaut (she/they) has been teaching cross-disciplinary undergraduate courses in public university, four-year private college, and community college settings since 2008. Dedicated to a student-centered pedagogical approach, Fomalhaut enjoys teaching diverse populations of students and meeting students where they are at.

Courses taught include:

  • Academic Writing
  • Personal Essay
  • Argument
  • Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
  • Queer Studies
  • Extraordinary Bodies
  • Women's Work: Gender and Labor
  • Women and Society
  • Feminist Theory
  • You Are Where You Live
  • Why Did I Get This Grade? Labor, Learning, and What We Value

Rachel Fomalhaut received her PhD in English, General Literature, and Rhetoric from Binghamton University. Their dissertation explores the affective representation of loss in multicultural women’s fiction, and includes a framework for affective pedagogy. Fomalhaut's work has been published as book chapters in Real-Life Writers: Composition Courses as Pathways for Student Success and The Oracle of the “tiny finger snap of time”: A Study of Novels with a Specific Time Culture. She has organized and moderated panels and presented papers at numerous national and regional conferences.

Fomalhaut served as co-founding Chair of the Ithaca College Contingent Faculty Union from 2017 - 2020. She continues to serve as a union steward working to improve faculty labor conditions in higher education, in deep awareness that teachers' working conditions are students' learning conditions.