College of Humanities Lectureships

Deborah Dean Barker Lectureship

Since Deborah Dean joined the BYU faculty in 1999, she has taught courses primarily in the English teaching program . She has also taught first-year writing, advanced writing, and graduate courses in composition pedagogy . Her research focuses on writing and language pedagogy, and on general secondary English teaching methods . She is the author of many articles and several books, including Strategic Writ ing (2nd ed), Genre Theory, What Works in Writing Instruction, and Revision Decisions . She has served as Associate Chair in the English Department and Associate Dean of Undergraduate Education; she is currently the program director of the English Teaching Program . She and her husband were raised in Alaska; they have six children and 23 grandchildren .

Valerie Hegstrom Christensen Lectureship

Valerie Hegstrom earned her PhD in Spanish literature with a minor in Theater from the University of Kansas. She joined the Department of Spanish & Portuguese at BYU in 1994, after teaching for four years at the University of New Mexico. Her research focuses on the early modern literature of the Iberian Peninsula, and has two related aims: 1) to recover and promote literary works by early modern women who wrote in Spanish and Portuguese and 2) to understand the meanings of early modern Spanish theatrical works through performance criticism and encourage the performance of those works. Her critical introduction and annotated edition of Ângela de Azevedo’s three-act play El muerto disimulado (Liverpool UP, 2018) responds to both objectives by making the Portuguese noblewoman’s Spanish-language play more easily accessible to academics and theater practitioners. Valerie’s current projects include an