Audrey Fessler

Audrey Fessler is delighted to have found a new academic home in the Watauga Residential College after she and her family moved to Boone in 2017.

Before that, she was an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire. For nearly two decades, she held a joint appointment in the English Department and the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program.

Dr. Fessler earned a bachelor’s degree in English from Bucknell University, and both her master’s and doctorate in English literature from the University of Michigan. Her doctoral dissertation focused on the mid-Victorian novelist Charlotte Mary Yonge. Since then, most of her publications have centered on British “New Woman” writers of the 1880s and 1890s.

For fun, she and her spouse, Jeff Vahlbusch, reviewed restaurants together for a Wisconsin newspaper for nearly a decade.

Dr. Fessler especially enjoys teaching Watauga courses focused on 19th-century British and American literature and the arts, as well as global constructions of monstrosity.