Mallory Szymanski won the prestigious University of Florida Graduate Teaching Award for her instruction in the University Writing Program, where she has taught since 2012.Currently a PhD candidate in the Department of History, she also teaches courses in sociology, history, and women’s studies.
Across these disciplines, Mallory maintains a collaborative pedagogy in which students and teachers work together to inspire curiosity, strengthen critical thinking tools, and hone professional writing skills. The UWP teaches that writing is a process and not simply the product of formulaic responses; a collaborative environment facilitates the patience and fortitude this process requires. Mallory complements this group-oriented theme with individual attention to students’ strengths, interests, and areas in need of improvement. She tailors daily lesson plans to address the distinctive skills and needs students bring from their high school training. From this base, students use the course to practice rhetorical strategies and writing fundamentals and produce coherent, convincing arguments. By the end of the semester, they will have mastered a writing process that is unique to them and that can aid them in future academic and professional undertakings.
Much like her teaching endeavors, Mallory’s research engages multiple fields. She studies sexual neurasthenia, a medical diagnosis given to fatigued American men in the late nineteenth century. Physicians heralded neurasthenia as the “national disease of America” and feared that modern civilization was crushing its workers underfoot. Mallory’s dissertation will provide a cultural and medical history of sexual neurasthenia to explain how this diagnosis sparked a national conversation about men’s sexual and reproductive health in the Gilded Age. She expects to complete her dissertation in Spring 2016 and pursue an interdisciplinary teaching and research position.