Joelle Moen has three degrees in English—a B.A. from Brigham Young University and an M.A. and PhD from Washington State University. She specializes in American literature, especially twentieth century and African American literatures. Her PhD dissertation centered on the response of African American writers (Chesnutt, Hurston, and Johnson) to the legacy of the pseudoscientific categorization of people according to race.
In 2018-19, Professor Moen served as a Fulbright Roving Scholar of American Literature and Culture in Norway. In this role she served as a traveling guest lecturer, giving workshops with topics that included Jim Crow laws and culture, rhetorical devices in the “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” decoding propaganda, revision strategies for writers, and various American literary and historical texts. She visited 81 schools and taught nearly 300 teachers some 9500 students. Since then, she has served on the Fulbright National Screening Committee for English Teaching Assistants.
Dr. Moen’s life was changed by a study abroad program to London, where she learned the wonders of studying art and culture. Since then, she’s visited all 50 of the United States and traveled to more than 40 countries outside the U.S.: Canada, Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, Honduras, Brazil, Argentina, Peru, Bolivia, Australia, China, Hong Kong, India, Nepal, Israel, Turkiye, the United Kingdom (Northern Ireland, Scotland, England, Wales), Ireland, Spain, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Poland, Austria, Slovenia, Slovakia, Hungary, Czech Republic, Croatia, Italy, Greece, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Republic of South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Russia (then the Soviet Union).