Overview
Dr. Spinner completed a Ph.D. in English with a concentration in Feminist Studies from Duke University in 2017, and received a M.A. in English from Georgetown University in 2010. She takes great pride in being an educator and is delighted to be back at Duke, this time around as faculty.
Her courses, much like her academic work, seek to challenge the disciplinary boundaries between writing and rhetoric, women's and gender studies, and art practice. At Duke, she has perfected her widely popular course "Radical Magic: Feminism & the Occult," which she piloted at the College of Charleston in the Spring of 2018. In her signature course, students explore the story-telling qualities of the Tarot that is derived from the 15th-century Italian playing card game of tarrochi, which would not be associated with the occult and divination until much later. Always open to new ideas , at the behest of her students, in the Spring of 2024, she assigned a grimoire for the final writing project. In this non-traditional assignment, students explore the the "magic" of the book as a material object in the modern age, delve into the possibility that poems and and songs might have a spell-like qualities to them, and play with experimental forms of writing that are informed by art and craft studies
Her book project Debunk Me Not: Magic and Marginalization in Nineteenth-Century Studies, delves into the puzzling nature of scholars of the nineteenth century who display an anxiety about their supernatural objects that is largely absent from scholars of the medieval and early-modern periods.. She argues that the desire to distance themselves from what they perceive as fraudulent is merely reproducing the debunking impulse of the nineteenth century, headlined by P.T. Barnum and later Harry Houdini. Dr. Spinner offers a method that adopts the views of the believer of the time and leaves open the idea that spiritualist practices, such as seances, Tarot, and spirit photography. In doing so, she argues that the beliefs and histories of the marginalized groups who were drawn to spiritualism come into relief.
If you spot her on campus, among other things, feel free to chat with her about roller-skating, crocheting, and why bagels in North Carolina will always be inferior to New York bagels. Hint: it's the water.