An assistant professor in the English department has been studying storytelling and how it builds our understanding of the world following four years of work in Qatar.
Nancy Small is an assistant professor at UW who’s been exploring the world of storytelling in Qatar, Texas, and now Wyoming.
“When people think of an English professor, they probably think of either people who are going to teach them how to write by correcting their grammar or they’re going to teach them about literature,” Small said.
Lecturer, researcher, director of first-year writing, and soon-to-be author are all titles that Professor Small has held in her career.
“I tell them I’m a different kind of English professor because I identify myself as a rhetorician,” Small said.
“The way I define rhetoric is how we use all kinds of symbols to make the world. Everything from our words, visuals, the clothes we wear, the cars we drive, the cities we live in, that’s all constructed as our built environment.
Currently, her research studies how everyday storytelling constructs our shared lifeworlds.
“When you build something, you make decisions on what it’s gonna look like, and that’s rhetoric. It’s all of those decisions about how we situate ourselves in life and how we communicate in life,” Small said.
Her journey to the University of Wyoming derived from pragmatic necessity, intellectual endeavors, and a sense of not knowing what to do next.
“When I was a senior in college, the job market stank. We were in a recession and I was like ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do.’ I was an English and Psych major,” Small said. “So I was like, ‘Well, I guess I’ll go to grad school.’”
“I didn’t know it, but I had some early talent for teaching, and when I finished my Master’s, I applied for a full-time teaching position,” Small said.
“It was a competitive job so it was amazing and shocking, but I got the job.”
Professor Small continued to work as a lecturer for Texas A&M until 2010 when she and her family got up and left Texas for a much different environment and culture.
Beginning in 2010, Professor Small taught English to students in Qatar and attended classes from 3 a.m. to 5 a.m. to obtain her doctorate, all while being a mother to three young children.
In 2016, Professor Small’s partner John began working with the UW Foundation.
“We moved here in 2016 and they did not have a job for me at this point,” Small said. “I was what was called a visiting assistant professor and that’s someone who teaches a lot of classes, which I was used to.”
“I really wanted to do research and I had been starting to do some research,” Small said. “So I harangued and annoyed every possible person that would have anything to do with that kind of position.”
Eventually, Professor Small obtained a tenured track position at UW in 2017.
“I was a professional lecturer for almost my whole career. I got my Ph.D. late in life which meant I started my research late,” Small said. “I tell people ‘You have a super seasoned teacher in me, but a newer researcher.”
Her current projects include a book on paradox and agency in transnational spaces, an edited collection of stories about transnational research, and a study of public commemoration and women’s suffrage.
