Heidi Stalla

A Modernism scholar and Creative Nonfiction writer, Assistant Professor Heidi Stalla also has deep experience designing arts and writing programming for new liberal arts colleges. Asst Prof Stalla was part of the inaugural faculty of NYU Abu Dhabi and directed its first Writing Program from 2010 to 2014. She joined Yale-NUS in 2014 as Assistant Professor, with a three-year term as Deputy Director of the Writing Program. While there, she built a writing center that catered to academic and creative writing; she spearheaded Writing Across the Curriculum initiatives; and she designed and led a peer tutoring program that combined creative and academic writing pedagogies.

Asst Prof Stalla is particularly interested in finding new forms for literary criticism and expression in today’s digital world. Her research includes Creative Response methodologies, both as a mode of production and also as a pedagogical tool in the classroom. Some examples of the latter range from first-year students building robots as a means of understanding academic writing conventions, to students in an upper level literature class composing music, or painting, or writing poetry, as a way of coming to embodied understandings of Virginia Woolf’s novels.

Asst Prof Stalla has published work on Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group; collaborated on audio essays that use modernist texts to comment on current events; and is working on an experimental documentary about modernist writer Ling Shu Hua’s four years in Singapore. She has presented on topics as diverse as leadership in the liberal arts; writing pedagogy for multi-lingual student populations; Global Modernism, and Life-Writing in the digital realm.

Asst Prof Stalla holds a BA in Classics (Honors) from Stanford (1998) and a DPhil in Literature from Oxford (2015).