Maura Tarnoff
Teaching Professor
Maura Tarnoff teaches Engineering Communications, Critical Thinking and Writing, Literature and Social Justice (Advanced Writing), and Shakespeare.
She received her Ph.D. in English from the University of Virginia and has taught courses at UVA, Macalester College, and Saint Louis University's Madrid Campus. She has published articles on the influence of early modern women's embroidery on 16th-century ideas of authorship, wonder in Shakespeare, and American Sign Language performances of Shakespeare's plays.
She is a member of SCU's Virtual Reality Faculty Learning Community and was recently awarded a Hackworth grant from the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics to develop programming that will explore how we conceive of presence, identity, and ethical responsibility in VR, as well as how to leverage the power and possibilities of immersive technologies to promote social justice.
In 2018, she was also awarded an Enhancing Teaching with Technology grant from the Collaborative for Teaching Innovation to develop a digital humanities annotation app.
Her current research explores the history of minstrel shows in the Santa Clara Valley and the question of how the process of making visible local histories of racial injustice may help us to sustain our commitment to social justice in the present.