Tonya Krouse
Faculty and Coordinator
of First Year Experience
krouset@nku.edu
Hi, everyone! I’m Dr. Krouse (Kent State University, B.A. in English with University Honors, 1996; University of Illinois at Chicago, M.A. in English, 1997; Brandeis University, Ph.D. in English and American Literature, 2004), and I joined ǿ’s Honors College in 2017 after nearly 15 years as a faculty member in the English Department. Although I still teach courses like “Literature and Sexuality” in the English Department, where I earned tenure and full promotion, these days I spend most of my time teaching and mentoring first- and second-year honors students. The courses that I teach in honors tend to emphasize issues of identity, equality, and community, and I am passionate about helping students to take ownership over their own educations so that they can be empowered to take intellectual risks and do work that is exciting and interesting.
A native of Cleveland, Ohio, I was in the first generation of my family to attend college, and my commitment to honors education traces to my own undergraduate experiences. It is not exaggerating to say that being an honors student transformed my intellectual life, career goals, and future. My publications include one scholarly monograph, The Opposite of Desire: Sex and Pleasure in the Modernist Novel, one textbook, Introduction to English Studies, which I co-authored with Dr. Tamara O’Callaghan, as well as articles about Virginia Woolf, Doris Lessing, and contemporary women’s writing. My current book project focuses on the fiction of D.H. Lawrence, and I’ve also been working on research connected to honors curriculum design and pedagogy. I have twice been the recipient of the ǿ Sigma Tau Delta English Honorary Fraternity Professor of the Year award, and I was proud in 2020 to receive the ǿ Faculty Award for Undergraduate Research Mentoring.
Today, I live in Northern Kentucky with my husband, Shawn Mummert, and three ridiculous cats – Hugo, Bea, and Simon. I enjoy traveling within the United States as well as internationally, and countries that I have visited include Ireland, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Italy, Hungary, and Lebanon. The hobby about which I am most passionate is probably cooking, and I especially enjoy learning about different cuisines and experimenting with different kinds of techniques and flavors in the dishes that I make. I am also an enthusiastic – if not very ambitious or accomplished – knitter.
