Emily Wells' debut memoir, A Matter of Appearance (Seven Stories Press, 2023), binds the author’s account of autoimmune disease to 19th-century French hysteria and discursive histories of ballet and illness. She has an MFA in fiction from UC Riverside, and has been an editor at several fashion and art magazines, as well as a newspaper reporter. She writes for publications like Bookforum, Vogue, Interview, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and others. She has been a lecturer in the composition program since 2018, and loves guiding her students to discover ways to make reading and writing engaging.
Courses Typically Taught:
- Writing 40
- Writing 45
- Writing 50
- Writing 60
- Writing 139W
Themes Typically Taught:
- Writing 60: Medical Humanities
- Writing 139W: Autobiographical Medical Narratives
- Writing 40: New Journalism and the Personal Essay
- Writing 45/50: Gender in Literature
Textbooks Needed:
- All readings will be made available on Canvas as PDFs or eBooks.
- Writing 40: The White Album by Joan Didion, excerpts from Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates, Forty-One False Starts by Janet Malcolm, and a selection of personal essays
- Writing 45, 50: Orlando by Virginia Woolf
- Writing 60: The Undying by Anne Boyer
- Writing 139W: The Undying by Anne Boyer, excerpts from The Invading Body: Reading Illness Autobiographies by Einat Avrahami, The Body in Pain by Elaine Scarry, The Cancer Journals by Audre Lorde, The Pain Scale by Eula Biss, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism by Elizabeth Grosz, selections from autobiographical writing on AIDS (Paul Monette, Thom Gunn, David Wojnarowicz, Timothy Liu, and others).
Email: wellse@uci.edu