Susan M. Felch
Susan M. Felch is Professor of English, Emerita, at Calvin University. Her undergraduate degree is in music and her master’s degree in theology. She earned her doctorate in literature at The Catholic University of America in 1991. In 1992, she began teaching at Calvin College (now Calvin University) and retired from that institution in 2020. At Calvin, Felch taught classes in Written Rhetoric, World Literature, British Literature, Environmental Literature, and Literary Theory & Criticism, as well as developing and teaching the required Senior Seminar for the English Department. Teaching has always been her greatest joy, the classroom a place of learning and rejuvenation.
Felch directed several off-campus programs at Calvin, including the Semester in York, England and the Arts Collective summer program in Liverpool. She was active in the Faith and Writing Festival, co-chairing it from 2004 – 2010. She also directed the Summer Seminar Program from 1997 – 2003, the Calvin Center for Christian Scholarship from 2008 – 2020, and the first-year Developing a Christian Mind course from 2016 – 2020. She co-taught the New Faculty orientation seminar at Calvin from 2007 – 2013. Outside of Calvin, she has been active in the Lilly Fellows Program, serving on the National Network Board and as a mentor for two cohorts of the Graduate Fellows Program and one cohort of the Faculty Fellows Program. She has worked with faculty development projects at various institutions in the United States, India, and Africa, and is a frequent lecturer at Christian colleges and universities. She served on the Board of Christianity and Literature for many years. Her research interests have focused on sixteenth-century British authors, especially women, although her many published articles and books also include work on literature and religion, Russian thinker Mikhail Bakhtin, Christian higher education, African American women, and a Chinese-English textbook.
The daughter of missionaries, Felch was born in Colorado. Her parents joined Wycliffe Bible Translators, and the family lived first in Mexico and then for many years in Papua New Guinea. Felch was educated via correspondence courses and, intermittently, with missionary children from Britain, Canada, the U.S., New Zealand, Australia, the Philippines, Korea, and other countries at the missionary base in Ukarumpa. It was, she remembers, a lovely way to grow up, being part of an extended missionary family and living, not just in another culture, but in several other cultures simultaneously. Felch’s family shuttled between the highland base and the Musa Valley, where they worked as linguists with the Yareba people. Living among the Yareba was a non-insulated existence. Sickness, death, birth, arguments, celebrations, gardening, storytelling—it all happened right next door. As a child, Felch sometimes carried small loads in a string bag suspended from her head. She swam in the river with the other children, and one of her friends had a pet wallaby.