LeeAnn Derdeyn

Dr. LeeAnn Derdeyn comes to academia with a flourishing business career and a substantive philanthropic and service background. Derdeyn’s personal and professional focus examines how we are as humans with each other and in the world. Her research and writing engage environment in the broadest sense, including ethics, justice and equity in its various guises. Since cognitive science and theory of mind have shown that reading literature—especially fiction—increases empathy, and the best writing arises from engagement, she immerses her students in LOTS of reading and writing that both encourages and challenges students to think critically, write purposefully, and engage the contending discourses of our world. 

Derdeyn has presented her research at prestigious conferences in the US, England, Ireland, and Italy. Her academic work is published or forthcoming in journals such as Modernism/modernity, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment (ISLE), College Literature, and English Studies, as well as three book chapters and several poems.  Dr. Derdeyn has two books in progress: Blindsighted: Alienation and Affirmation in T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound and Love the Jackalope: Insecurity in Contemporary English Literature from David Foster Wallace to Ali Smith. She is a 2015 and 2018 awardee of the SMU HOPE (Honoring Our Professors of Excellence) award.  

Courses taught

Composition & Rhetoric, Creative Writing, World Literature, The Environs of the Trojan War, 20th Century Irish Literature, Identity & Diversity in Contemporary Literature, Literature and Environment, Love and (In)Security in Contemporary Literature, and an interdisciplinary STEAM course (intersections of Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts & Humanities, Mathematics)

Areas of Research

Primary Field: 20th/21st Century British, Irish, and American Literature

Secondary Fields: Modernism, Creative Writing, Certificate in Holocaust

Studies