Mariah Crilley, Ph.D.-Director of Interdisciplinary Studies and Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies and University Curriculum Innovation
Harris Hall, room 5168
mtcrilley@vcu.edu
Mariah Crilley joined the Interdisciplinary Studies Program in January 2020 after teaching in VCU's Department of Focused Inquiry. She has also taught composition, rhetoric, and American literature at Duquesne University and West Virginia University, where she completed her Ph.D. in 2019. Her dissertation drew on ecocriticism, disability studies, and the medical humanities to investigate how diseases like syphilis and smallpox shaped early American bodies and bodies of literature. She has published on malaria and the colonization of the American West, modern health wearables, and Superman and Huntington's disease. Like her research, Dr. Crilley's pedagogy emphasizes agency, inclusivity, and accessibility. Teaching critical thinking, research, writing, and interdisciplinarity as verbs and practices, she strives to build an accessible learning environment that enables all students to succeed.
