Biography
Rhona Trauvitch, Ph.D., received her B.A. in Government from Smith College, M.Sc. in Social and Public Communication from the London School of Economics and Political Science, and Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She has taught in the Program in Comparative Literature at UMass Amherst and in the Department of English at Westfield State University. Since 2014 she has been an instructor in the Department of English at FIU, where she teaches face-to-face, online, and hybrid courses in multicultural literature, narrative theory, popular culture, and science fiction, among other subjects. She was awarded a Faculty Senate Award for Excellence in Teaching (2018), and a College of Arts, Sciences & Education Award for Teaching (2017).
Dr. Trauvitch’s research interests span speculative fiction, popular culture, and intersections of narrative theory, science, and mythology. She has contributed chapters to several edited collections, including The Routledge Handbook of Popular Culture and Tourism (Routledge, 2018), Interface between Literature and Science: Cross-disciplinary Approaches to Latin American Texts (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015), Jim Henson and Philosophy: Imagination and the Magic of Mayhem (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2015), and Literary Cartographies: Spatiality, Representation, and Narrative (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). Dr. Trauvitch is currently working on a book project about tropes in global speculative fiction that communicate experiences of alterity and exile. She also researches the atypical rhetoric of fictionality, as well as readers’ interactions with fiction and the social experience of narrative.