Lisa Hermsen Headshot

Lisa Hermsen

Professor

Department of English
College of Liberal Arts
Department of English

5854754553
Office Location

Lisa Hermsen

Professor

Department of English
College of Liberal Arts
Department of English

Education

BA, Briar Cliff University; MA, University of Missouri at Columbia; MA, Ph.D., Iowa State University

Bio

I am a Professor in the Department of English, past Carolyn Werner Gannett Chair in the Humanities and the past Chair of the English Department at RIT. I specialize in the rhetoric of science, technology, and medicine – particularly through rhetoric's fourth canon, memoria, the memory palaces, the common places, and information culture. 

Since 2019 I have been collaborating with Rebekah Walker, DHSS Librarian, and a team of undergraduate students to create a Scholarly Digital Edition of a collection of manuscripts from the firm of William Townsend & Sons, printers, bookbinders, account book manufacturers, Sheffield UK (1830-1910). The collection is held in the Cary Special Collections. We are transcribing and encoding the “Business Guide and Works Manual,” which is a rare manual offering instructions for a specific type of stationery bookbinding, a financial record documenting business expenses, and a commonplace with jottings about daily schedules, references to Charles Dickens, pages of trade/business addresses, and tucked-in ephemera. As a 400-page idiosyncratic volume with no hierarchical textual structure, many tables and formulae, and random marginalia, this manuscript is an artifact of information culture regarding the network of books, book buyers, book materials, binders – forwarders, apprentices, journeyman, sewers. If it is to be accessible to scholars now, it must be encoded and turned from a flat digital scan to a dynamic searchable edition. RIT students are using TEI (best practices for creating digital editions in the humanities as cited by MLA and AHA) to encode the text with XML markup and a customized schema. They are also researching 19th century commodities, the potential shift in handwriting, and Sheffield history.  

My book, Manic Minds: Mania's Mad History and Its Neuro Future (Rutgers UP, 2011), emerges from textbooks, asylum records, genetic research articles, memoirs, and diagnostic manuals. Not only has “mania” never been stabilized as a modern medicalized disorder, the memoria of 'mania' has emerged fluid from pre-professional to professional American psychiatry and now persists frenzied into the neuro-future. 

As co-PI on a team awarded an NEH Humanities Connections Grant (2017), I directed the first delivery of a course sequence emphasizing public memory and “community” from a host of disciplinary perspectives: historical, geographical, literary, environmental and socioeconomic. Undergraduate students engaged with Rochester, NY as a city that formed, changed and often retained a distinct sense of place amid shifting economic, political and technological forces. This course sequence built on the University’s long-standing tradition of community service, as well as faculty engagement with area communities. 

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Select Scholarship

Invited Keynote/Presentation
Hermsen, Lisa. "Hysteria." Meaningful Play. Michigan State University. East Lansing, MI. Oct. 2011. Conference Presentation.

Currently Teaching

ENGL-250
3 Credits
Designed for English majors, this course provides an introduction to methods used to analyze, interpret, and visualize textual data. Students will learn how to formulate research questions, collect relevant data, and disseminate findings. Students across tracks will leave the course with a toolbox of approaches for applied work as well as critical understanding of methodological and ethical considerations of working with textual data.
ENGL-260
3 Credits
This course is a rigorous introduction to the formal study of rhetoric. Often defined as the “art of persuasion,” rhetoric helps us understand the complexities of marshaling others to see, believe and act in particular ways. Reading a range of rhetorical theory—from the ancient to the contemporary—students will investigate how language is used to create meaning, construct identity, organize social groups, and produce change. Because argument and persuasion inherently involve ethical questions of power, students will also consider who and what benefits or is marginalized by particular assumptions, claims and practices. The course emphasizes cultural rhetoric and rhetorical genre theory to ask what different types of texts do, what cultural role they play in shaping knowledge, and what ideologies they embody. Students will analyze the rhetoric observed in a range of media—academic research, public communication, digital material, data visualization—and compose arguments, identifying assumptions, misinformation/disinformation, and counter arguments. Students engage with rhetorical theory to pose complex questions about important social issues, consider the discursive requirements of the moment, and write intentionally for a target audience.
ENGL-322
3 Credits
The course uses both literature and geography, artful writing and creative mapping, to explore both fictional and real places. From Sherlock Holmes’s 221B Baker St. London and Charles Dickens’s 19th century London to J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth and Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea, geography is more than an artistic theme, and maps are more than creative illustrations. Literary geography explores the ways in which authors work with detail not only to create setting but to depict geographical locations. The course will challenge students to understand “landscape” as a more than a backdrop. Throughout the semester we will engage with the socio-cultural notions of “place”: home and community, borderlands and human migration, smart cities and mundane landscapes, territory and tourism. Students may practice plotting authors and their works, following the routes characters take across a landscape, or making the geography of imaginary worlds visible.
ENGL-328
3 Credits
Exploration of the many ways in which science employs modes of persuasion, and the ways it does so differently in different cases of scientific work. Emphasis will be given to the conjunction between science and rhetoric; examples will be drawn from key figures and texts in the history of science, ongoing controversies in contemporary scientific debates, the popularization of science in public media, and the representation of science in fiction.
ENGL-345
3 Credits
This course will study the changes in definitions, explanations, and depictions of madness as expressed in psychiatric texts, asylum records, novelists, cartoonists, artists, photographers, filmmakers–and patient narratives. Certainly, madness has assumed many names and forms: the sacred disease, frenzy, hysteria, mania, melancholy, neurosis, dementia, praecox, schizophrenia, phobia, post-traumatic stress disorder. Those afflicted have been admired, pitied, mocked, hidden from public view, imprisoned, restrained, operated on, hospitalized, counseled, analyzed, and medicated. The brain, particularly the disordered brain, has long been a source of interest. This course explores the brain from the history of madness. The course takes a humanist, rhetorical, and historicist approach to the question of madness within changing social institutions and popular discourse.
ENGL-345H
3 Credits
This course will study the changes in definitions, explanations, and depictions of madness as expressed in psychiatric texts, asylum records, novelists, cartoonists, artists, photographers, film-makers–and patient narratives. Certainly, madness has assumed many names and forms: the sacred disease, frenzy, hysteria, mania, melancholy, neurosis, dementia, praecox, schizophrenia, phobia, post-traumatic stress disorder. Those afflicted have been admired, pitied, mocked, hidden from public view, imprisoned, restrained, operated on, hospitalized, counseled, analyzed, and medicated. The brain has long been a source of interest, particularly the disordered brain. This course explores the brain from the history of madness. The course takes a humanist, rhetorical, and historicist approach to the question of madness within changing social institutions and popular discourse.
ENGL-422
3 Credits
This course takes as its premise that spatial thinking is critically important. Spatial thinking informs our ability to understand many areas of 21st century culture, as mobile interfaces and geospatial technologies enable us to engage with our surroundings in new ways. The study begins with the history maps and mapmaking, and explores how maps work. As students create representational, iconographic, satirical, image-based, informational, and other map forms, the course emphasizes the map as narrative. The course develops into an exploration of the ways, particularly in texts, that mapmaking creates cultural routes, mobile forms of ethnography, and ways of imagining travel and tourism in the era of globalization. The diverse writers represented in this course are rethinking space as a dynamic context for the making of history and for different organizations of social and communal life.

In the News

  • March 31, 2020

    Richard Newman and Lisa Hermsen.

    Podcast: Experiencing History Where it Happened 

    Intersections: The RIT Podcast, Ep. 34: Studying history is more than poring over textbooks and old documents. History Professor Richard Newman and humanities Professor Lisa Hermsen talk about place-based learning, which gets students into the community to experience where the history happened.