Faculty & Courses
Jill Darley-Vanis was awarded the Clark College Exceptional Faculty Award for 2025 where she serves as a tenured faculty member in the English department. Her scholarship has been published in the journal Teaching English in the Two-Year College (TETYC) and the books Transparent Design in Higher Education Teaching and Leadership and Teaching Accelerated & Corequisite Composition. Jill holds Bachelor of Arts degrees in English and French (Oregon State University), but she also studied Spanish at Chemeketa Community College and spent one year at the Université de Poitiers in Poitiers, France. This time abroad is what inspires her to bring this same transformative experience to two-year students. Jill is Chair of the Modern Language Association’s Higher Education Practices (HEP) Board for Two-Year Colleges, and she is a member of the American Conference for Irish Studies (ACIS). She finds joy and inspiration in paddle boarding at her family cabin in southern Oregon, cheering for Oregon State Beaver athletics, and immersing herself in the music, folklore, and culture of Ireland.
Proposed Classes
SOC&112 Intro to Fiction – Haunted Dublin: The Gothic in Irish Literature
This course asks, why have some of the greatest, most chilling gothic works come from Dublin writers? Using Oscar Wilde’s, The Picture of Dorian Gray and Bram Stoker’s Dracula, we’ll visit the haunts of these authors, both physical and creative, to understand Dublin’s haunted past. Since gothic literature, by its nature, downplays the realistic to consider the darker side of experience, showcasing a return of the repressed, we’ll look at these formal departures from realism to better understand the city and its ghosts. The gothic defies or subverts the ruling authority, and the monster is a way to think about power structures: how does this better create understanding in a place of historic violence? (This class satisfies Humanities A credit or a GE or SE credit.)
ENGL&101/102 English Composition I or II – Knowing the Song: Dublin’s Music as Gateway to Understanding *Students may take either 101 OR 102
This split-level rhetoric and composition course, based on student need(s), will use the music of Dublin to understand the place. The 101 course will study the rhetoric of album covers, of lyric, and of orchestral accompaniment as entrée to learning about the genre-based nature of rhetoric; later, by thinking and writing in and across genres, students learn and employ the transferable elements of written communication and the conventions writers master for academic work and professional life. 102 students, on the other hand, will choose one album and band to create a research project and paper on a topic central to Irish identity. While this latter group will learn the conventions of writing in only one genre, research, both groups will visit the Irish Rock ‘N’ Roll Museum Experience and the Wall of Fame Dublin in Temple Bar to explore possibilities, from U2 to Van Morrison to Enya to Sinead O’Connor to the Cranberries or the Script and beyond, all to understand Dublin through its music. (These overlapping courses serve all students working on an AA-DTA in communication distribution).
Irish Life & Culture
Make the most of your time in Dublin and really get emersed in your new home with this required course which will explore a different theme of Irish Life and Culture each week, from Irish history and politics to Irish language, sports, music, dance, food and drink, and much more! This course will be taught by one or more local Irish faculty, with Professor Darley-Vanis as faculty of record, and will be a combination of guest lectures and experiential learning with visits to museums and galleries, tours, workshops, scavenger hunts and more!