Faculty Spotlight: Elise Takehana

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Elise Takehana, Ph.D., sitting on a stone bench with a child

Elise Takehana, Ph.D., was born in Southern California, the oldest of four children and the first to attend college. Growing up, she was broadly interested in nearly every topic she studied, but she took special interest in biology, physics, engineering, architecture, and visual and performing arts. She even balked at the idea of becoming an English teacher, as her own high school English teacher suggested. But, lo, when the dial stopped spinning, that is where she landed! 

She earned her B.A. in English Literature and M.A. in English Composition from CSU San Bernardino, and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Florida. Elise currently lives in Harvard, MA with her husband and three sons. When she is not reading, she can be found baking, knitting, cycling, caring for an out of control collection of houseplants, or playing games with her children. As a bona fide Francophile, she is in Paris as often as possible, imagining herself as a jazz pianist.

Elise has been a professor at Fitchburg State since 2012 and teaches first-year writing, magazine journalism, nonfiction, rhetorical style, editing, experimental writing, and media studies either in creative writing courses or the occasional graduate literature seminar.

Her research interests are equally varied with essays and articles on 20th and 21st century print and digital literature, media studies, aesthetics, genre studies, posthumanism, digital humanities, and multimedia composition. She has also taken create pleasure in contributing to and charting out projects like The Alphabet Project, When We Were Normal, and the Robert E. Cormier Digital Archive Exhibits with her students and the FSU’s archive. 

The Baroque Technotext book cover

Her first book, The Baroque Technotext, released in March of 2020, focuses on the baroque aesthetic practices that underpin several print and digital literary texts that embrace the meaning value of their materiality. You can check out her book currently located as part of the Library's Faculty Spotlight display near the entrance on the first floor.

With a hermeneutic monograph behind her, Elise is now looking to develop new methodological skills to contribute to the growing field of quantitative and networked literary analysis and stylometry.