Ziona Kocher and Madeline Crozier Sutton to Assume New Jobs in Fall 2025
In Fall 2025, Dr. Ziona Kocher (UTK 2022) will be returning to their home state of Florida to take on a coveted tenure-track professorship at Florida Atlantic University. Like most English Literature scholars, Kocher found the path to tenure-trackdom fiercely competitive, but today they credit their scholarship and mentorship within the UTK’s English Department with much of their success.
Kocher grew up in Tallahassee, completed their undergrad in Sarasota, then returned to Tallahassee to complete their Master’s degree in English Literature at Florida State. It was there that they “fell in love” with eighteenth-century literature, and they now claim they “haven’t escaped since.”
When Kocher applied to UTK, they knew they wanted to work with renowned eighteenth-century scholar, Dr. Misty Anderson, and Kocher was delighted when Anderson was able to chair their dissertation committee. While at UTK, Kocher received fellowships from the Lewis Walpole Library and the University of Tennessee Humanities Center. They also earned the Catherine Macauley Prize, an annual award given by the Women’s Caucus of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS) which recognizes the best graduate student paper in feminist or gender studies. ASECS wrote that their award-winning work “Pretty Young Gentleman: Age, Embodiment, and Queerness in The Country Wife” gave readers a new understanding of the Restoration comedy The Country Wife by exploring “how gender fluidity is created through the crossdressing figure to layer masculinity and femininity in complex exchanges that center space for same-sex desire”
In their dissertation, “Breeches: Theatrical Cross-Dressing and Queer Embodiment, 1675-1745”, Kocher went on to explore the cross-dressed figure of the actress through a specifically queer and trans approach. Because many of the characters marry men, Kocher explained, scholars have tended to read them as “more conservative.” In their research, however, Kocher explores how some characters experience “gender euphoria [or] the feeling of joy and comfort that you get when you find a way of embodying your gender,” as a result of “push[ing] these boundaries, and getting to live life either as a man or as a more genderqueer figure.”When asked about how UTK had helped them meet their career goals, Kocher expressed “a great deal of affection for [the English] department” saying they “felt extremely supported since finishing [their] PhD [in 2022].” While serving as a full-time lecturer, Kocher has remained active in their field, attending regional and national conferences for ongoing networking. Additionally, Zocher says, the members of their dissertation committee—Drs. Misty Anderson, Gerard Cohen-Vrignaud, Hilary Havens, and Gina Di Salvo—as well as Dr. Nancy Henry have been “extremely generous with their time” and helping them with job materials. Without their support” Kocher say, “this [for sure] wouldn’t have happened.”
Dr. Madeleine Crozier Sutton, a soon-to-be graduate of the UTK English Department, is set to start as an Assistant Professor of Practice in Rhetoric and Writing at Duke University this Fall. Dr. Sutton grew up in the Midwest and completed her PhD at DePaul University in Chicago, Illinois. There, she received a BA (2018) and MA (2020) in Writing, Rhetoric, and Discourse (WRD) and developed a passion for the field of writing studies.
When it came time to apply for her PhD, she chose to apply to UT based on the impactful work of the RWL faculty as well as the opportunity to work with the Judith A. Herman Writing Center (JAHWC) staff. Sutton especially wanted to work with Dr. Tanita Saenkhum, who would eventually become her advisor, mentor, dissertation chair, and co-researcher. Together, Drs. Sutton and Saenkhum revised the ENGL 102/132 cross-cultural first-year composition course curriculum, and are co-authoring a journal article to share their findings. Sutton is grateful not only for Dr. Saenkhum but for Dr. Sean Morey, Director of First-Year Composition, who has “taught her the value of collaborative leadership and project management” as well as Dr. Kat Powell in the JAHWC for preparing her to continue teaching and training undergraduate and graduate writing consultants.
The Duke University Thompson Writing Program extended an offer to Sutton because of her experience teaching first-year composition, her work in writing center administration, and her active research agenda in writing center studies and writing studies scholarship. The Search Committee highlighted her high-quality student-centered teaching and mentorship for undergraduate students that supports the Thompson Writing Program’s mission to promote writing across campus.
At Duke, Sutton will teach courses such as first-year composition (Writing 120: Academic Writing) and Writing 255: Literacy, Writing, Tutoring, and develop innovative courses for the new Minor in Writing & Rhetoric. Madeline will also work as Assistant Director of the Thompson Writing Program Writing Studio, where she will train writing consultants, consult with Duke faculty on writing instruction, conduct program assessment, and lead collaborative research in writing center studies.
Thanks to the support she has experienced at UT, Sutton now values this collaborative research more than ever. As she explains, “I have helped develop my positionality as a scholar whose work is steeped in relationships. [At UTK] I have learned to conduct ethical, reflexive, accountable, and methodologically sound research that seeks to build relationships among students, instructors, and institutions.” The English department, too, is grateful for the opportunity to collaborate with Dr. Sutton.