Hope College | English

David Klooster

KLOOSTER, DAVID, Professor (2000) and Chair of the Department; Faculty Moderator (2007-09).

Education: B.A., Calvin College (1975); M.A., University of Chicago (1976); Ph.D., Boston College (1985).

Interests: American Literature (esp. 19th Century); Composition; Pedagogy; Literature of the American Civil War; American Conversion Narratives; American Travel Narratives; Hawthorne and Melville.

Selected Works: Co-author, The Writer's Community (1985); Co-editor, Ideas Without Boundaries: International Education Reform Through Reading and Writing for Critical Thinking (2000); Co-editor, Phantoms of a Blood-Stained Period: The Complete Civil War Writings of Ambrose Bierce (2002).

Distinctions: Ruth and John Reed Faculty Achievement Award (Hope, 2008); Fulbright Fellow in American Studies, Austria (2005); Fulbright Fellow in American Literature, Czechoslovakia (1992-93).

Publications:

with Russell Duncan, editors, Phantoms of a Blood-Stained Period: The Complete Civil War Writings of Ambrose Bierce (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002). Alone among important American writers, Ambrose Bierce fought for four years in the Civil War. This volume gathers for the first time virtually everything Bierce wrote about the war, from letters composed on the field of battle to maps he drew as a topographical engineer, from his masterful short stories to his final ruminations before he disappeared into Mexico. His accounts provide a compelling record of the battlefield, the psychological traumas the war induced in its soldiers, and the memories that would haunt survivors.

et al, editors, Ideas Without Boundaries: International Education Reform Through Reading and Writing for Critical Thinking (International Reading Association, 2000).
Educators from nine former socialist countries gathered in the summer of 1997 with volunteers from the United States and Canada to launch a new international school improvement project called Reading and Writing for Critical Thinking, RWCT. They based their efforts on two major tenets: (1) Schools can contribute to the formation of open societies and democratic cultures by helping students to become individuals who create, question, and apply knowledge responsibly; and (2) Educators across vast cultural divides can work together to bring about educational reform.

with Patricia L. Bloem, The Writer's Community (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 1995).
The Writer's Community helps students to understand the academic and professional discourse communities they hope to join. It provides students with practical strategies for reading and writing prose in the academic disciplines and suggests way to prepare for the writing they will do beyond the university. The Writer's Community encourages students to explore and develop not just one but many styles to suit the audience and the occasion.