To borrow a line from Walt Whitman: Karen Head contains multitudes. The assistant professor in the School of Literature, Media and Communication is also director of the Institute’s Communication Center and a thrice-published poet—plus, she spent the past year developing, implementing and analyzing one of the first freshman composition MOOCs. For a while, she had nearly as many offices as job descriptions. Since 2011, though, Head has been headquartered in an office within the Communication Center’s spacious suite on the third floor of Clough Commons, where tutors hold (one-on-one, free, confidential) sessions on paper writing, public speaking, video conferencing and more. And it’s not just for struggling students. “We’re here,” she says, “to help our really amazing students succeed even more.”
Head snatched this example of “visual rhetoric” from Piedmont Hospital after her father had heart surgery a few years back. Designed by nurses, it’s instructive (doctors use the heart illustration to outline surgical procedures) as well as practical (patients use the pillow to protect their sutures while standing, coughing or riding in cars). “It’s a brilliant piece of technology design,” Head says.
In 2008, Head garnered the unlikely distinction of teaching Tech’s first all-female course, a class on Jane Austen. She wrote her undergraduate thesis on the British novelist, and in grad school toyed with the idea of becoming an Austen scholar. This Pride & Prejudice-themed board game was a gift; its board and pieces are fully intact.
“I really want to have more student art in the center as a whole,” she says. “Ben Townsend, one of our peer tutors, did these pieces, and I purchased them at the end of the term. I love art—I would never want to be in a space that didn’t have art.”
One downside of her new Clough office: no window. Head’s former digs, in the Skiles building, overlooked a huge gingko tree. “I miss that tree so much, so I bought this [mobile] at the Inman Park Festival,” she says. “I was like, ‘Well, I gotta bring the gingko here if I can’t plant one.’”
The bookshelves provided under the Clough building’s original furniture plan weren’t heavy-duty enough for Head’s many tomes, so she went rogue at Ikea. “I mean, I’m humanities research faculty. I have a lot of books,” she says. “This doesn’t even begin to cover it. They should see my house.”
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