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About Your Instructor

Paul Blom, PhD Student and Teaching FellowHeadshot of Paul Blom (Photo credit: Sarah Boyd)

Email: paulblom@live.unc.edu

Office: Greenlaw Hall, Room 509

Office Hours: Tuesdays and Thursdays, 9:30am-11:00am; and by appointment

  • Office hours will be held in-person in my office and/or via my Zoom personal meeting room. (I am not including the link here on our public-facing website. The link is included in the official version of our course syllabus at Sakai>Resources. It is also in my email signature. A document with full Zoom information for my Zoom personal meeting room is on Sakai under “Resources” as well.) You are welcome to visit me (in person or virtually) during these office hours unannounced, but due to the high volume of student visits, it’s best if you schedule an appointment with me in advance. You are also welcome to schedule a time to meet with me outside of my regular office hours; we can meet either in-person in my office or virtually through Zoom. Any virtual meetings we hold (during or outside of scheduled office hours) will take place through my Zoom personal meeting room. Again, a document with full Zoom information for my Zoom personal meeting room is on Sakai under “Resources.” Please also feel free to talk to me before or after class and/or via email with questions, concerns, etc., although sometimes, a synchronous meeting is more productive and efficient than communicating via email.

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). (If you’re interested in our Summer 2022 iteration of the course, see www.tinyurl.com/VAGH2022.) 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 fifth 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.

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.

For more about me and my creative/academic work as well as my training as an instructor and resource for student support, see the following:

 

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