The past few summers have been productive ones for Dr. Eleanor Reeds, associate professor of English, who has secured four consecutive Summer Research Grants from Hastings College to work on furthering her research in literary studies. In just the last few months, two of these projects have been published in peer-reviewed academic journals.
Both articles draw explicitly on Reeds’s experience teaching literature across genres and periods at Hastings College.
“Defining and Teaching Close Reading as Disciplinary Method” appeared in the January 2026 issue of Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture.
In it, Reeds reviews both recent scholarship and pedagogical resources on close reading to identify the intertwined challenges of defining and teaching this disciplinary method, making recommendations for more effective classroom practices.
“Close reading is our version of the scientific method because it’s the foundation of everything we do in literary studies,” said Reeds, “but there’s a lot of ongoing debate over what it looks like and how to teach it so that students learn successfully how to think and write in our discipline.”
“Baseball as Form: Narrative and Temporality in The Cactus League” was published in 2025 in Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction.
“I first taught this novel by Emily Nemens for a course on sports literature in 2020 and realized it was the perfect case study for showing what’s so similar about baseball and literature as areas of human activity,” Reeds said.
The article offers an approach to baseball literature that explores the sport as a method of structuring time and space that intersects fruitfully with literary and aesthetic forms.
“Dr. Reeds’ publication of two peer-reviewed articles, both supported by Summer Research Grants, underscores the extraordinary impact of funding faculty professional development,” said Dr. Wayne Riggs, Hastings College vice president for academic affairs. “Her scholarship exemplifies the teacher-scholar model that defines faculty at a liberal arts college like Hastings, where professional achievements directly enrich their teaching and are often shared with their students.”
What’s next for Reeds? Recently awarded the 2026 Knappenberger Faculty Development Award, Reeds said she will use the funds, as well as her upcoming sabbatical, to complete a book-length project on “The Poetics of Motherhood” which will explore work by writers including Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sylvia Plath and Maggie Smith.
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