English & Modern Languages

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Dr. Emily Heady

Dean, College of General Studies
Associate Professor of English
eheady@liberty.edu
(434) 592-3713
DH 3404

Biography
Dr. Emily Heady was born and raised in southern Ohio. She came to faith at a very young age, but she thinks of her college years as those most crucial for her spiritual development. While life at the secular university taught her to appreciate her Christian family and friends, to learn to “be separate,” and to resist the pull toward secularism that defines American culture, it also inspired her to think out her faith in more wide-ranging, smarter ways, and to integrate her Christianity more thoroughly with her academic work. Today, Dr. Heady devotes herself in the classroom and in her research to promoting ecumenical dialog, developing a distinctively Christian way of practicing literary criticism, and helping her students to read and write in ways that are both academically and spiritually excellent.


Dr. Heady’s scholarly interests include evangelical literature, John Wesley, the Victorian novel (especially Dickens and Eliot), British religious culture, and Victorian visual culture, particularly the development of the photograph and video technology during the nineteenth century. She is at work on a book about religious conversion scenes in the realist novels of the nineteenth century.

Dr. Heady is married to Chene, who is a professor at Longwood University. While they have no human children, they have a demanding affenpinscher-border terrier mix named Whitney. In addition to rescuing dogs and classic cars, Dr. Heady enjoys photography, cooking, Ohio state football, and making music. She is the worship team pianist at Lynchburg First Church of the Nazarene and teaches C2, the College and Career Sunday School Class, with her husband.
 
Degrees Held
B.A. Spanish and English, The Ohio State University
M.A. English Literature, Indiana University
Ph.D. English Literature, Indiana University
 

Scholarly Publications 
“Beyond the Tutorial: Collective Cultures and Shared Grief in the Writing Center.” Praxis 5 (2007): n.p. http://projects.uwc.utexas.edu/praxis/?q=node/172 .
“A Steam-Whistle Modernist?: Representations of King Alfred in Dickens’s A Child’s History of England and The Battle of Life.” Forthcoming from Studies in Medievalism.
“‘Must I Render an Account’: Genre and Self-Narration in Brontë’s Villette.” Journal of Narrative Theory: Realism in Retrospect 1 (2006): 341-64.
“The Polis’s Different Voices: Narrating England’s Progress in Dickens’s Bleak House.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 48 (2006): 312-39.
Conversion in Crisis: Realism and Religious Experience in the Victorian Novel. Dissertation Abstracts International. UMI Research P, 2005.
“Flutters, Feelings, and Fancies: John Wesley’s Sentimental Sermons and the Spirit of the Age.” Christianity and Literature 53 (2004): 141-62.
“The Negative’s Capability: Real Images and the Allegory of the Unseen in Dickens’s Christmas Books.” Dickens Studies Annual 31 (2002): 1-21. 
 
Scholarly Presentations 
“Asking the Right Questions: Developing a Viable QEP.” 2007 SACS Annual Meeting.
“Assessing Writing in the Classroom and Beyond.” 2007 TRACS Annual Meeting.
“Imitation and the Inimitable: Mimicry and Power in Dickens’s American Notes.” 2007 Dickens Symposium. “How a Capitalist Converts: Reading Parables in Dombey and Son.” 2006 North American Victorian Studies Association Annual Conference.
“A Steam-Whistle Modernist?: Representations of King Alfred in Dickens’s A Child’s History of England and The Battle of Life.” 21st International Conference on Medievalism.
“‘Happiness is not a potato’: Narrating Growth (Both Moral and Middle-Class) in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette.” M/MLA Annual Conference.
“‘Let All Materialists Draw Nigh’: Narrating Britain’s Realist Conversion in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette.” 2004 North American Victorian Studies Association (NAVSA) Annual Conference.
“The Polis’s Different Voices: Narrating England’s Progress in Dickens’s Inheritance Novels.” Narrative Society Annual Conference.
“Dickens, Phantoms, and Photography.” Invited presentation with Professor Joss Marsh. Indiana University.
“Sacramental Biology: Water, Blood, and Maggie’s Sexual Selection in Eliot’s Mill on the Floss.” The Midwest Conference on Christianity and Literature. The University of Illinois at Chicago.
 
Courses Taught 
English 503—Bibliography and Research
English 458—Women’s Literature
English 321—Victorian Literature
English 216—British Literature II
English 215—British Literature I
English 102—Literature and Composition
English 101—Composition and Rhetoric