Karin Costello

Professor

“I really love school. But after you’ve finished a PhD, they won’t let you stick around unless you go to the other side of the desk.”

Thus does Karin Costello explain her reluctant transition from student to full-time member of the SMC English faculty. But during the recent rains, she nearly changed her academic focus again. “We’re just now digging out from a major mudslide,” she says with a grim chuckle. “We very nearly became part of a geological study!”

Mudslides aside, Karin is thriving in the midst of her SMC classes. She teaches English 1 and 2 but it’s her English 39 class—dealing with images of women in literature—that most clearly captivates her. “I teach a broad overview of what women have to say, in fiction and non-fiction, about their family relationships, work, and the theme of silence which is very large in women’s writing,” she says. “I explore the kinds of voices women have found from a multi-cultural perspective. So, with writers from the white upper middle class to Native Americans, and with Latinas and African American writers, I try to explore each group in terms of who we are and the stories we tell.”

Karin is currently working on a new textbook that will be “a gender/cross-cultural reader. It will focus a lot on women’s issues,” she explains. “But it will deal equally with men and show how we learn to be masculine and feminine in our culture and how that privileges and inhibits us. From my perspective,” she continues, “the more we can find the ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ characteristics in each of us, the fuller people we will become.”

Karin says the hard work she demands in her classes “results in realizing that the brain and the experience you are creating will last you for the rest of your life.”

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