Sean Yeager joined Kenyon’s Science and Nature Writing program in 2025. They earned their Ph.D. in English at The Ohio State University, and had previously served as an assistant professor of physics and mathematics at Pacific Northwest College of Art. Yeager’s data-driven visualizations of time in narrative received the Paul Fourtier Prize for best paper by an emerging scholar at the 2019 Digital Humanities Conference. Yeager’s research on neurodivergent reading practices received honorable mention for the Nadal Prize at the 2022 International Conference on Narrative, and their research on neurodivergent temporalities received honorable mention for the Bruns Prize at the 2024 meeting of the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts.
2024 — Doctor of Philosophy from The Ohio State University
2019 — Master of Arts from Pacific Northwest College of Art
2013 — Master of Science from Texas A&M University
Courses Recently Taught
Each section of these first-year seminars approaches the study of literature through the exploration of a single theme in texts drawn from a variety of literary genres (such as tragedy, comedy, lyric poetry, epic, novel, short story, film and autobiography) and historical periods. Classes are small, offering intensive discussion and close attention to each student's writing. Students in each section are asked to work intensively on composition as part of a rigorous introduction to reading, thinking, speaking and writing about literary texts. During the semester, instructors assign frequent essays and may also require oral presentations, quizzes, examinations and research projects. This course is not open to juniors and seniors without permission of the department chair. Offered every year.
Each section of these first-year seminars approaches the study of literature through the exploration of a single theme in texts drawn from a variety of literary genres (such as tragedy, comedy, lyric poetry, epic, novel, short story, film and autobiography) and historical periods. Classes are small, offering intensive discussion and close attention to each student's writing. Students in each section are asked to work intensively on composition as part of a rigorous introduction to reading, thinking, speaking and writing about literary texts. During the semester, instructors will frequent essays and may also require oral presentations, quizzes, examinations and research projects. This course is not open to juniors and seniors without permission of the department chair. Offered every year.
Prerequisite: ENGL 103 or 104. Only open to first-year and sophomore students.
Long ago, in answer to the question, "What is time?" St. Augustine wrote: "If no one asks me I know, but when someone does I do not." Time continues to be hard to define or explain. But where philosophy and physics fail, some say, narrative succeeds. Narrative engagement — as the creative record of history, the form of personal recollection or the way to trace the succession of moments in an ordinary day — may be the cultural form through which we truly understand the meaning of time. To test this theory, this course reads narrative fiction that experiments with the representation of time to see what such fiction has to say about time and how the problem of time determines the forms, styles and techniques of narrative fiction. Primary texts include novels and stories by Charles Dickens, Leo Tolstoy, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, Jorge Luis Borges and others. Secondary reading includes philosophical treatments of time, literary-critical accounts of the time-narrative relationship, and cultural histories of time's changing meanings. Prerequisite: ENGL 210-29 or junior standing.
