Julie Ooms is Associate Professor of English at MBU, where she teaches courses in composition, world literature, and American literature. She has published articles on several different 20th century American writers, and presented conference papers on American war literature, dystopian literature, composition and rhetoric, and comic books. Writing is, for her, first and foremost a way to communicate and forge connections between different people across time, space, and experience. In her teaching and interacting with students, she seeks to help them find connections between themselves and the writers of the past, and actively connect with others as they assume the responsibility of being readers, writers, and researchers.

Education

PhD in English, Baylor University

BA in English, Dordt College

Awards / Recognition

MBU Distinguished Professor Award, 2022-2023

Emerson Excellence in Teaching Award, 2020

Discussion Fellow on the intersection of the doctrine of creation and modern science, St. Louis Regional Discussion Fellowship through the Henry Center for Theological Understanding at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, 2019-2022.

Seminar Participant, Virgil and the Modern Christian Imagination, Samford University TCIT – July 10-14, 2017

Seminar Participant, Teaching Dante’s Divine Comedy, Samford University TCIT – May 31-June 5, 2015

Select Publications:

Deep Reading: Practices to Subvert the Vices of Our Distracted, Hostile, and Consumeristic Age. Baker Academic, 2024.

“‘A private holy spirit in small letters’: Sylvia Plath’s Secular-Age Religion.” Renascence 73.3(Summer 2021): 169-189.

“Three Things My Students Have Taught Me about Reading Dante.” Religions 10.3(2019).

“‘Some quick, however slight, therapy’: Neighborliness and Rebuilding Community after War in J.D. Salinger’s War Stories.” Christian Scholars’ Review 46.1(2016): 43-63.

“‘I don’t know who you are…but I love you’: Neighborly Love as Essential, Deformed, and Failed in V for Vendetta.” Integrite 14.1(Spring 2015): 10-27.  

“‘Battles are always fought among human beings, not purposes’: Tim O’Brien’s Fiction as a Response to the Crisis of Modernity.” Renascence 66.1(Winter 2014): 25-45.

“‘I mean you didn’t really know Walt’: Walt Glass as Salinger’s Way of Keeping His “Oath” about Telling War Stories.” Journal of the Short Story in English 62(Spring 2014): 67-78.

“‘Take care with whom you break bread’: The Sacramental Meal in Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses.” Beyond Borders: Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses.  Ed. by Rick Wallach.  Miami: The Cormac McCarthy Society, 2014. 213-223.