Patricia J. Ferreira

Patricia J. Ferreira's intellectual focus is race, culture, and ethnicity, and her courses in American literature, world literature, and writing usually address and seek understanding through difference.

Her doctorate is from McGill University, where she focused on rhetorical exchanges between African Americans and the Irish. Much of her published work continues to address their connections, including her book-length biography of the abolitionist Isabel Jennings, founder of the Cork Ladies Anti-Slavery Society and confidant of Frederick Douglass (Cork University Press). Ferreira has served as a consultant for a documentary on Douglass's abolition tour of Ireland and has been interviewed on National Public Radio as well as the Irish national broadcaster, Radio Telefis Erin. She has received awards for teaching excellence from both Norwich University and the University of Vermont and was a Major McGill Fellow. She was influential in founding the Honors Program at Norwich and is a champion of the university's Undergraduate Research Program, where her students often complete original scholarship. When she's not in the classroom or library, Ferreira can usually be found in her home apiary where she keeps three colonies of honey bees, or in the pottery studio, learning to be a ceramicist.