Rate My Professor Martha Stoddard-Holmes

Martha Stoddard-Holmes is Professor Emerita of Literature and Writing Studies in the Literature and Writing Studies Department at California State University, San Marcos, where she joined the faculty in 2000. Specializing in Literature, her work integrates body studies, disability studies, literary analysis, and creative writing. She earned her MA in Creative Writing from the University of Colorado, Boulder, studying with notable poets and fiction writers. Drawn to CSUSM's cultural studies emphasis, Stoddard-Holmes has taught interdisciplinary courses including Victorian narratives such as A Christmas Carol and The Woman in White, graphic memoirs like Stitches, films such as Wit, children's literature into film adaptations, Jane Austen novels and their screen versions, and creative writing processes incorporating mindfulness, somatic practices, and drawing or comics. She has mentored first-generation and non-traditional students, supporting their persistence toward BA degrees, graduate studies, and teaching careers.

Stoddard-Holmes's research examines representations of disability and illness as embodied social identities in Victorian cultural studies, comics, and personal narratives. Her landmark book, Fictions of Affliction: Physical Disability in Victorian Culture (University of Michigan Press, 2004), has received 462 citations. Key publications include Thinking Through Pain (Literature and Medicine, 2005), Victorian Fictions of Interdependency: Gaskell, Craik, and Yonge (2007), Cancer Comics: Narrating Cancer through Sequential Art (Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, 2013), and chapters on disability in Jane Eyre, The Secret Garden, sensation fiction, and Frankenstein. She co-edited A Cultural History of Disability in the Long Nineteenth Century (Bloomsbury) with Joyce L. Huff and has published creative nonfiction on ovarian cancer, including Body Without Organs nominated for a Pushcart Prize. In 2013-2014, she received the Harry E. Brakebill Distinguished Professor Award, California State University, San Marcos's highest faculty honor, nominated by students and colleagues. Her influence extends through editorial contributions, public essays, and facilitating writing groups blending pedagogy with somatic and artistic practices.