Tracy Floreani

Tracy Floreani is Professor of English and Director of the Center for Interpersonal Studies through Film & Literature at Oklahoma City University, where she teaches American Literature, Topics in Ethnic Literature, Critical Reading and Writing, Composition, and Senior Seminar. She is the author of Fifties Ethnicities: The Ethnic Novel and Mass Culture at Midcentury.

About Tracy:
As a teenager, I loved languages and reading, so I chose the English major and took lots of classes in literature and creative writing, but also linguistics, Romance languages, and American Studies. I always had a lot of diverse interests and knew that English was a good place to bring them all together. Even as a freshman I planned to go on to graduate school and earn a Ph.D. so I could immerse myself deeply in the subjects that were so interesting to me. I studied broadly, but eventually became an Americanist because I'm fascinated by all the paradoxes in our culture.

Teaching at OCU allows me to keep learning along with my students, because we are a strong community of learners.  I find liberal arts students very open to interdisciplinary exploration and to examining our culture’s complexities through imaginative literature. In both the classroom and my research, I’m particularly interested in how notions of national identity evolve over time, how race and ethnicity fit within larger national narratives at various historical moments, and how artists engage in larger discussions of what it means to be American. ~http://www.okcu.edu