Expanding Employment Horizons For English PhDs Panel

We will be joined by May Peckham ( Learning & Development Manager for Baseball Operations, Boston Red Sox), Ana Quiring (Learning Innovation Specialist in the Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of Missouri-St. Louis), Claire Class (Associate Teaching Professor, The University of Tampa), and Sarah Brenes Akerman (Manager of Donor Communications, Opera Theatre of St. Louis).

This panel is part of a larger series of events on Expanding Employment Horizons for English PhDs, sponsored by an RDE Mini-Grant from the Center for the Humanities.

May Peckham is the Learning & Development Manager for Baseball Operations at the Boston Red Sox, where she leads learning strategy, skills-based training development, and leadership initiatives across the organization. Before moving into the world of sports, May built a career in corporate learning and curriculum design following her PhD in English and American Literature from Washington University in St. Louis. Her journey from academia to industry highlights how research, teaching, and the nuanced communication skills honed through academic work can translate into meaningful, influential positions beyond the university.

Ana Quiring is the Learning Innovation Specialist in the Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, where she leads faculty development programs on teaching with AI, active learning strategies, HyFlex and hybrid teaching, experiential learning, early career professional development, and more. She also teaches undergraduate courses in UMSL’s Pierre Laclede Honors College on AI, literature, and culture, and is co-chair of the Focus on Teaching and Technology Conference.Ana earned a PhD in English literature from Washington University in St. Louis in 2022, where she also completed a postdoctoral fellowship. She has taught in WashU’s Prison Education Program and worked in nonprofit communications. Her scholarly and public writing has appeared in Digital Humanities Quarterly, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Feminist Modernist Studies, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Avidly, The Millions, and elsewhere.

Claire Class is an Associate Teaching Professor at The University of Tampa. She was formerly a Volkswagen Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Freiburg in Germany and an Assistant Professor of English with the New York Institute of Technology campus in Nanjing, China. Her research traces the formation of an anti-essentialist sociology in the modernist fiction and life writing of Jane Addams, Ida B. Wells, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Her work has appeared in MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States, Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers, and Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts.

Sara Brenes Akerman is the Manager of Donor Communications at Opera Theatre of Saint Louis recently made the switch to working as a development writer at Opera Theatre of Saint Louis. Prior to that, Sara worked as a College Writing Instructor and a Senior Tutor for the Writing Center. During her time as an English grad student, Sara also interned for WashU's Marketing and Communications office.