About

Image of Hayley Stefan, body with shoulder-length brown curly hair, wearing a yellow blazer with flowers and a maroon shirt underneath. The figure stands smiling in front of a bookshelf.

Hayley is a literary studies scholar and digital humanist. Currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Multi-ethnic & Latinx Literature at the College of the Holy Cross, she holds a PhD in English from the University of Connecticut, where she was also the 2019-2020 Humanities Institute Dissertation Research Fellow. She completed her MA in English at Trinity College (Hartford) and BA in English and Spanish at Worcester State University.  

Hayley’s current book project examines anti-racist, feminist activism in arts and literature as responses to contemporary US mass traumas. She also runs the School Shooting Fiction Archive, a digital humanities project-in-development examining the growing genre of school shooting fiction. The SSF archive works brings together analyses of author demographics, publishing trends, and text analysis as a way to be more critical about how we talk about disability and race in gun violence. Hayley has shared some initial work from the project at conferences for the American Literature Association, Children’s Literature Association, and the Northeast Modern Language Association. Check out some early data analyses from those presentations here.

Here, my black cat Bellatrix lays next to my computer monitor on my desk with her back to the camera. She is wearing a yellow collar.

Hayley also works closely year-round with the Rising Scholars Program, a residential summer program for high school students in foster care. 

Outside of higher ed., Hayley is diving into reading more fantasy & YA series and eating serious amounts of chips. She also has a cat named Bellatrix (less after the Death Eater, more Bonham Carter) who is a big fan of walking across keyboards and contributing to her work.