
Katherine Troyer, Ph.D.
- Director Collaborative Learning & Teaching , The Collaborative for Learning and Teaching
I joined Trinity as the Assistant Director of the Collaborative for Learning and Teaching in 2018. My office bookshelf reveals a seemingly strange combination of interests as scholarship on the horror genre sits next to books on the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL). For me, though, the connecting thread is the reoccurring role that spoken and unspoken anxieties--whether in a horror film or in the classroom--play in shaping our thoughts and ideas. As a genre scholar, I am interested specifically in how horror (literature, film, and games) expresses larger cultural concerns about place. My SoTL work focuses on using a model of transparency to embrace, rather than ignore, underlying tensions--such as procrastination--at the heart of learning and teaching.
In my work with students and in the courses I teach here at Trinity, I see collaboration and conversation as key to developing critical thinking and communication skills. I host the podcast Such a Nightmare, with a current Trinity student, in which we analyze horror texts through a various theoretical frameworks. This year, I will be teaching a course on the home in American horror. As part of the "Creative Expression" component of the Pathway curriculum, this class allows me to combine my love of horror with my interest in creativity studies. As the Assistant Director, I relish opportunities to help faculty—through programming, events, and consultations—realize the best versions of themselves as professors and scholars. My ongoing SoTL project is a podcast entitled Playing the Sandbox: Conversations in Pedagogy, in which I explore the practice of play as a method for developing curiosity and agency in our students.
For a copy of my full CV, please email me at ktroyer@trinity.edu.
In terms of my interdisciplinary scholarship, my areas of research and teaching center on the intersections between the humanities, cultural studies, and humanist geography. In particular, I explore film, literature, and other forms of popular culture through the lens of genre studies, with a specific interest in horror, fantasy, and speculative fiction. In terms of my SoTL work, my focus is on transparency in learning and teaching (TILT in Higher Ed), which allows me to reframe pedagogical experiences through multimodality and play.