Stephanie Hankinson is a PhD Candidate in English, Ketcham Endowment Research Assistant, and former Assistant Director of the Expository Writing Program at the University of Washington. Her primary areas of expertise are the imagination of natural disaster in 20th-century cultural productions of the American South and Caribbean, comparative black diaspora studies, and environmental aesthetics. She is currently working to finish her dissertation titled “Natural Catastrophe in Hemispheric American Cultures”. This project rethinks catastrophe by analyzing cultural and historical dimensions as a point of ecological transition, as a crucible for literary innovation, and on a scale of human costs in four contexts (earthquakes, hurricanes, sugar and oil). 

She served as co-editor for the composition textbook Writer/Thinker/Maker: Approaches to Composition, Rhetoric, and Research (2017). She has published book reviews in recent issues of The Black Scholar as well as Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature. Most recently she contributed a book chapter to the collection EcoCulture: Disaster, Narrative, Discourse on the chronologies of disaster and narrative possibility of adaptive politics in contemporary American film (Lexington 2017).

She is currently teaching courses in the English departments at the University of Washington and South Seattle College. She is also a founding member and contributor to Seattle-based performance critique collective: DeConstruct. DeConstruct is dedicated to intersectional analysis and peer-review of cross-disciplinary performance to foster increased equity in the arts in the Puget Sound region. She currently serves as the Managing Editor of Process: Journal of Multidisciplinary Undergraduate Scholarship.