DR. NANCY STEFFEN-FLUHR

Associate Professor of English in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences

Director of the Murray Center for Women in Technology

Research Interests: My scholarly research and writing tends to be eclectic and interdisciplinary, including forays into science fiction studies, gender studies, film studies, and media studies. The common denominator is my abiding interest in how gender and sexuality are constructed in US popular culture. I am especially interested the relationship between gender and technology as interdependent social constructs and the ways in which this relationship is depicted in film and television.

Courses: I teach undergraduate courses in several different disciplines, including SCIENCE FICTION (Literature) and WOMEN AND TECHNOLOGY (Science, Technology & Society Program). I also teach a graduate seminar, WORKING IN TEAMS, which prepares professional and technical communicators to work collaboratively in virtual environments.

Creative Writing: My new play, HEARTBREAKER--an existential comedy, loosely based on the life of the legendary Swedish tenor Jussi Bjorling--had its first staged public reading last June at the Arthur Seelen Theatre in New York.

Advocacy Interests: As director of the Murray Center and as co-chair of the NJIT Status of Women Faculty Committee, et. al., I try to leverage my scholarly research on gender and technology to help advance women students and faculty in their scientific and technological careers--e.g. identifying effective recruitment tactics, best classroom practices, and viable strategies for institutional transformation. This work takes place on several fronts at once and is inherently interdisciplinary and collaborative, which appeals to me.

Current Collaboration: I am the Principal Investigator on a pending $3.5 million grant proposal to the ADVANCE Program at the National Science Foundation: MORE THAN THE SUM OF ITS PARTS: ADVANCING WOMEN AT NJIT THROUGH COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH NETWORKS (submitted July 2005). The grant proposal is the product of ongoing synergistic activity among four women faculty from different disciplines.

Personal Background: I am a Midwesterner by birth, raised in the Chicago suburbs (Evanston/Skokie); but I went to the West Coast for my B.A. in English Literature (Stanford University) and then back to the East Coast (Brandeis University) for my Ph.D.  After a brief stint as a political journalist, I worked as a press representative for Congressman Allard Lowenstein and, a bit later, for George Wiley’s National Welfare Rights organization. I came to NJIT in 1971, where I have been ever since. I am especially proud to have helped establish the Murray Center in 1995 and to have won an NJIT Excellence in Teaching Award. In addition to my life-long love of film and theatre, I am intensely interested all forms of visual art and do a little Sunday Painting (botanical watercolors) when I have the time. I am also an opera fan (Bel Canto). Although I have spent most of my adult life in the city, I now live with my husband in the woods of northern New Jersey, in a lodge built the same year the Titanic went down, where he and I are locked in various losing struggles with squirrels, deer, and black bears.

To learn more about the Murray Center, go to http://www.njit.edu/v2/womenscenter/