Rate My Professor Rebecca Entel

Rebecca Entel is Professor of English and Creative Writing at Cornell College, where she serves as Director of the Center for the Literary Arts. She teaches courses in 19th-century American literature, creative writing, multicultural American literature, U.S. and Caribbean literature, and the literature of social justice. Entel earned her Ph.D. in English with a specialization in Nineteenth-Century American Literature and a minor in Creative Writing from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2007, with a dissertation titled The Politics of Comparability: Figuring Common and Uncommon Ground of the Civil War. She received her M.A. in English from the same university in 2000 and her B.A. in English with a concentration in Creative Writing from the University of Pennsylvania in 1999, graduating summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, and with honors in English.

Entel joined Cornell College in 2007 as Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing, advanced to Associate Professor in 2013, and was promoted to full Professor. Previously, she was a teaching assistant at the University of Wisconsin-Madison from 2000 to 2007, instructing courses such as Introduction to Creative Writing, American Literature surveys, and Native American Literature. Her scholarly publications include 'Writing “En Masse”: Louisa May Alcott’s Civil War Experience and The Commonwealth' in American Periodicals (2014), “Words that Populate the World: Yiddish and Survival in Saul Bellow’s Herzog” in Australian Journal of Jewish Studies (2007), and contributions to forthcoming volumes such as Arts and the American Civil War and MLA’s Teaching the Literatures of the American Civil War. Her creative work features the novel Fingerprints of Previous Owners (Unnamed Press, 2017) and short stories in journals including Cleaver Magazine, Joyland Magazine, Medulla Review, and Glimmer Train, with “Perfect Companion” earning a Pushcart nomination in 2013. Honors include Creative Writer-in-Residence at Summer Literary Seminars in Lithuania (2014), finalist in the David Nathan Myerson Fiction Contest (2014), Gaarde-Morton Junior Faculty Award (2009), and multiple Mellon Foundation grants. She has presented at conferences including the Midwest Modern Language Association and Society for the Study of American Women Writers.