Dagmar Van Engen

Dagmar Van Engen is an associate teaching professor, honors faculty fellow, and director of the Barrett Writing Center. His research and teaching explore gender-nonconformity in speculative fiction, multiethnic American literatures, and composition pedagogy.

Current research projects include a study of how Octavia E. Butler’s journals and commonplace books can inform contemporary writing classes by reframing writing as habit, labor, and speculation. Dagmar has previously published on queer ebook erotica, gender transition and animal biology in science fiction, and the labor of accessible writing pedagogy.

Dagmar teaches courses on multiethnic science fiction, consent cultures, advanced writing for honors theses, writing centers, and of course the Human Event. At the Barrett Writing Center he is focused on building programming for honors thesis writing and expanding the center’s commitment to access, inclusion, and equity. In The Human Event, Dagmar’s students examine futurity, history, the fantastic, and other alternative ways of understanding ourselves and the world around us in world texts. He has directed undergraduate honors theses on topics including queer of color critique, trans media, feminist popular culture, and antiracist composition studies.

Dagmar received his Ph.D. from USC, where he taught introductory and advanced writing classes and completed a dissertation on nonbinary genders in scientific and literary representations of invertebrate animal life. He believes in accessible and consent-focused pedagogy, and hopes you do, too.