NANCY BARTA-SMITH is Emeritus Professor of English at Slippery Rock University. Her research and teaching areas include intertextuality; intersections of literature, science, philosophy and the environment; critical theory, and rhetoric. Her research is informed by feminism and the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. She has published in the International Philosophical Quarterly, Forging Radical Alliances (Rowman and Littlefield) and Literature, Writing, and the Natural World (Cambridge Scholars). She co-authored the book In Search of Eloquence: Cross-Disciplinary Conversations on the Role of Writing in Undergraduate Education (Hampton Press) with Cornelius Cosgrove, and essays in Teaching English in the Two-Year College and Eloquent Images (MIT Press) with Danette DiMarco. She is co-editor with Danette DiMarco of Inhabited by Stories: Critical Essays on Tales Retold (Cambridge Scholars). She is a recipient of Slippery Rock University’s President’s Award for Scholarly and Creative Achievement. She was Graduate Coordinator for the MA in English at Slippery Rock University from 2014 until her retirement in 2019 and taught Introduction to Writing in the Disciplines and Literary and Cultural Studies in the graduate program curriculum. Her essay "Dimensions of the Flesh in a Case of Twins with Which I Am Familiar: Actualizing the Potential for Shared Intentional Space" appears in Maurice Merleau-Ponty: Space, Place, Architecture (Ohio University Press 2015). Current research focuses on the work of the environmental writer Wendell Berry and the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty.