Craig W. Smith

Special Lecturer
Office: 166 Dodge Hall
Phone: (248) 370-2739
Fax: (248) 370-2748
Email: [email protected]

Biography

As a young man, Craig Smith worked on the editorial staff of The New Yorker while moonlighting with the gay and queer press, and engaging in AIDS activism and LGBTQIA+ community awareness. He later wrote his doctoral dissertation on The New Yorker's fraught history with LGBTQIA+ authors and subject matter. Individual and community care giving have been central to his life. He contributes to both scholarly and creative journals as critic, poet, and fiction writer.

Smith's Interests include LGBTQIA+ and feminist literature and theory, intersections of poetry and cinema, and the confluences of education and love from Classical to contemporary cultures.

Regarding teaching, Smith believes that we can never fully know another person, because each person is infinite. We are here in this life for a short time, to connect with one another through empathy. The vocation of the teacher is to provide students with ways of exploring their own infinity, and to do so kindly, gently, and without presumption. Smith has taught writing and rhetoric at Oakland University since 2002.

Education

Ph.D. in English. Wayne State University (2003).
B.A. in English. University of Michigan (1984). 

Courses

WRT 1050 Composition I
WRT 1060 Composition II
Literature and Critical Theory, The Honors College