About Your Instructor | Writing in Health and Medicine, Spring 2021

Paul Blom, PhD Student and Teaching Fellow

Office: Greenlaw Hall, Room 509

Office Hours: Tuesdays and Thursdays, 1:30pm-3:00pm; and by appointment

All office hour visits will be held virtually. If you are a student, you have received the link to my virtual office hours already. It is also posted prominently on our Sakai course site. You are welcome to visit me during these virtual office hours unannounced, but due to the high volume of student visits, it’s best if you set up an appointment with me in advance. You are also welcome to schedule a time to meet with me virtually outside of my regular office hours. When you join the virtual Zoom room, you might be redirected to a virtual waiting room in case I’m meeting with another student. Please wait for me to allow you to join my room to meet with me. If you’d like to meet with me in-person individually or in small groups outside of normal class time, please contact me so we can make the appropriate arrangements.

Mail: Greenlaw Hall, CB #3520, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3520

UNC profile page: https://englishcomplit.unc.edu/grad-student/paul-blom/

Professional website: https://pauleblom.com/

About your instructor: I received my BA in English with a minor in Creative Writing from Birmingham-Southern College in Birmingham, AL in 2008. I then received my MA in English from DePaul University in Chicago, IL in 2010. I have extensive experience as a writing tutor, editor, proofreader, freelance copywriter, and instructor in the areas of writing, composition, and literary analysis. I have served as the Teaching Fellow for the Yale University summer session study-abroad course AFST S350/FILM S340/HLTH S350: Visual Approaches to Global Health (2015, 2016, 2019) which combines traditional epidemiological methods with visual storytelling in Johannesburg, South Africa and Mbabane, Eswatini (formerly known as Swaziland). During the fall of 2019, I taught ENGL 123: Introduction to Fiction and served as a TA for ENGL 268: Medicine, Literature, and Culture with Professor Jane Thrailkill. I am also currently on retainer as a writer of promotional videos, short narrative films, and documentary films for Creative Cabin Studios of Atlanta, GA and Visual Epidemiology of New Haven, CT.

This is my fourth year at UNC-Chapel Hill, where I am currently a doctoral student in English Literature, planning to concentrate on the long twentieth-century American Literature (from 1865 to contemporary) and its intersections with health humanities and literary trauma studies. I am also currently serving as the Fiction Co-Editor for the Carolina Quarterly literary magazine and the Co-Director for the Literature, Medicine, and Culture Colloquium here at UNC. This summer, I plan to co-teach a Yale University summer session course on communicating global health concerns and narratives across multiple genres, audiences, and media.

As an instructor of ENGL 105i with a focus on writing in health and medicine, I look forward to the opportunity to introduce all of you to a variety of genres and modalities for communication, expression, and composition in a discipline that is so integral to the human experience (and my own research!) and is rife with ethical and intellectual concerns. It is my fervent belief that critical thinking, as a tool for better understanding the perspectives of others, when combined with improved abilities for careful and effectively thoughtful communication, can be tools to create better interpersonal connections on an individual, local, national, and international scale, ultimately creating a better world for us all.

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