“Baldwin Totally Blew My Mind”: Kendall Dinniene on SOU, Graduate Study, and Teaching Literature
By Nylah Winchester, senior English major
February 10, 2026
Pictured above: Kendall Dinniene
In 2018, Kendall Dinniene graduated from Southern Oregon University with a degree in English. While at SOU, she worked closely with Dr. Alma Rosa Alvarez and Dr. Diana Maltz, whose courses and mentorship played a key role in preparing her for graduate study in English at Southern Methodist University (SMU) in Dallas, Texas. Kendall found SOU’s small classes, which “encouraged robust participation,” and the “warm and supportive” English faculty integral in building confidence for success in graduate seminars. This environment prepared her to work closely with faculty in graduate school.
“Both Alma and Diana modeled many of the teaching practices that I now use. They are brilliant educators who treat students with real generosity, and I try to live up to their example in my own courses.”
– Kendall Dinniene
One course in particular left a lasting impression. Kendall recalls that taking a class on James Baldwin “totally blew [her] mind,” and eventually led her to write her senior capstone on Giovanni’s Room—a text she now teaches in her own courses. She also credits her experience as a teaching assistant with easing her transition into the classroom: “Alma was kind enough to have me TA for her in my final semester, which made teaching a lot less scary!”
Dr. Alvarez and Dr. Maltz’s mentorship was very formative for Kendall. “I can’t say enough good things about Alma and Diana. What incredible professors and people!” She further credits Dr. Maltz with shaping her development as a writer, explaining, “I used to genuinely look forward to getting papers back from her covered in comments and advice.”
Graduate school, however, came with its own challenges. Kendall admits that “There’s just no preparing for the avalanche of texts you have to read and understand in an English PhD program.” Still, Kendall notes that practice and persistence made all the difference, especially when she encountered texts that prompted her to rethink how literature represents body weight.
Kendall originally went into grad school planning to research queerness and disability in Chicana writing, but in her first year, she read two texts: Emily Eden’s Up the Country and Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. These texts did things with body weight “that really intrigued [her].” Yet, Kendall discovered that she could not find much scholarship within literary studies that helped her understand what she was seeing, which is how “authors use fatness to discuss race, gender, and national identity. For example, Eden uses fatness to figure nineteenth-century India as overly sensual, atavistic, and in need of British control, tacitly justifying colonialism and even empire-induced famine.” Due to the lack of scholarship, Kendall’s research led her to fat studies, an interdisciplinary field that “complicates hegemonic ideas about fatness” and examines how body weight is racialized.
These studies inspired Kendall’s dissertation, The Fault of Our Forms: Fatness and Race in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century American Literature and Culture. Body weight also motivates her current book project where she focuses on authors like Toni Morrison and Carmen Maria Machado: “My second book project will look at how my other primary subfield, Black feminist theory, has historically engaged with fatness, tracking specifically the fat politics of 20th-century Black feminist literature and activism.” She further explains, “As a fat person deeply invested in ending anti-fatness and white supremacy, this work is meaningful on both an intellectual and a personal level.” Fat studies is a rather new field, but Kendall believes that it offers “a new set of analytical tools that can greatly benefit literary studies, as well as other fields.” She hopes that more literary studies scholars will use these tools in the future.
“I was so passionate about my argument and felt prepared by coursework and exams to commit it to paper.”
– Kendall Dinniene
Kendall’s commitment to analyzing body weight also shapes her pedagogy. A few years ago, she specifically taught a class on representations of fatness in contemporary multi-ethnic US literature. Even her syllabi that “don’t focus on critiquing hegemonic beliefs about body weight always incorporate those critiques.” For instance, this term her students will “think critically about the racialization and (un)gendering of fatness as [they] read Audre Lorde’s Zami and Emma Copley Eisenberg’s Housemates.”
Beyond course content, Kendall pays close attention to the physical classroom itself: “Those tiny chairs with the desks attached that populate so many classrooms? They tell fat students that their presence in college is a surprise, and not necessarily a welcome one.” She strives to create an inclusive learning space—one of her core priorities as an instructor.
Teaching remains one of the most rewarding parts of Kendall’s career. She recently taught a “very fun” class on the Manic Pixie Dream Girl (MPDG). The students read Daisy Miller, The Sun Also Rises, Passing, Sula, and Fight Club, and they had a unit on film which included Elizabethtown and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. “The main point of the class was to strengthen students’ reading, writing, and critical thinking skills, and to do this we focused on the trope of the MPDG and what she can tell us about American society and cultural production.” Her favorite part of the course was her students’ video podcast episodes, in which they analyzed a film in small groups.
Kendall recently joined Duke’s Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies Department as a Postdoctoral Associate. In this role, she will help design the Institute, which connects Black feminist scholars worldwide. Kendall exclaims, “It’s an important space dedicated to Black feminist thought and collaboration. I’m most excited about meeting this summer’s scholars, and about designing new ways to keep attendees in contact and support them as they graduate and begin their careers.”
“I think my favorite moments are when a student says something that makes me think about a text in new ways. That’s very exciting!”
– Kendall Dinniene
Kendall advises students considering graduate school to do their homework; she emphasizes that picking the right institution requires time and effort: “You want to apply to programs that have multiple faculty members who can support your research, and there’s just no shortcut to figuring that out.” She urges students to “think about the financial support a program offers beyond the stipend. Conferencing, research travel, publishing, these are all things that you just have to do as a PhD student if you want to find a job in academia (they’re also really fun!), and they take material and other forms of support.”
Kendall’s story demonstrates what thoughtful mentorship, rigorous study, and intellectual courage achieve—and of how SOU’s English Program shapes scholars who transform the field of English; I hope we all strive to be more like Kendall Dinniene!
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Interested in being featured on the English Program blog? Or know someone who is interested? Contact English Program blogger Nylah Winchester-Robinson at winchesterrobinsonn@sou.edu.
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