Traynor Hansen
Assistant Professor of Writing and English; Director of Campus Writing
Email: thansen3@spu.edu
Phone: 206-281-2403
Office: Marston 233
Education: BA, MA, PhD, University of Washington. Specialties: 18th- and 19th-century British Literature, the essay as a genre, composition pedagogy and practice
Traynor Hansen earned his PhD in English Literature from the University of Washington, where he specialized in British literature of the long-eighteenth century, culminating in the work of writers of the Romantic movement. Dr. Hansen’s literary scholarship focuses on the development and practice of essay writing, from the sixteenth century through the nineteenth. His dissertation, Revealing Character and Concealing Identity in the Romantic Familiar Essay, is a study of essays written for literary magazines and newspapers during the first few decades of the nineteenth century. Just as today’s media offers a tremendous amount of information, sharply divided along partisan lines in a highly charged political landscape, so did the periodical environment of the early nineteenth century. His research explores the strategies that writers used to navigate those tensions and establish relationships with their readers in the process.
Dr. Hansen’s interest in the writing strategies of “literary” essayists led to his interest in the strategies that scholars of all levels use in their own writing, from students in first-year writing classes to professional academics. As Director of Campus Writing, Dr. Hansen oversees SPU’s writing curriculum and supports faculty pedagogy across the university. He is invested in helping students navigate all stages of their writing processes and recognizing that different approaches work for different writers in different writing situations. He is especially concerned with helping writers work through writing anxiety and other problems that can occur in the writing process. His most recent pedagogical scholarship focuses on helping both faculty and students develop better theoretical and practical approaches to the role generative AI tools (such as ChatGPT) play—or don’t play—in academic writing processes.
If you give him the chance, Dr. Hansen will also talk your ear off about baseball (he’s a long-suffering Seattle Mariners fan), Star Wars, or LEGOs.
Selected Publications
- “Public Confidences: Hazlitt’s ‘Table-Talk’ and the Romantic Familiar Essay.” Prose Studies, vol. 41, no. 1, 2020, pp. 1–25.