Dr. Cheryl Spinner is Instructor of the Thompson Writing Program at Duke University. She has taught a wide range of courses in English Departments and Women’s Studies Programs, ranging from the University of Maryland, College Park, the College of Charleston. A prolific writer and thinker, she writes academic manuscripts, experimental literature, and screenplays.

Dr. Spinner takes great pride in being an educator. Her favorite part of the job is, without a doubt, mentoring students as they go on to achieve their goals and dreams. Her courses, much like her academic work, seek to challenge the disciplinary boundaries between writing and rhetoric, cultural studies, and art practice in non-traditional projects. She is currently writing an article that details the experience and value of giving students the opportunity to create their own grimoires for their final project.

Throughout her academic work, Dr. Spinner creates images that are an integral part of furthering critical points, making her analyses multimedia productions. She has given invited talks and lectures at Cornell University and other institutions on the subject of her academic manuscript, Debunk Me Not: Magic and Marginalization in Nineteenth Century Studies. She explores in Debunk Me Not how contemporary scholarship at its best exposes, and at its worst ridicules, those who employ and believe in supernatural methods to better make sense of the world. She offers an alternative method of analysis, which she has coined intuitive historiography that leaves room for the uncertain in the academic treatment of spirit mediumship, Tarot, and spirit photography. Click here to read more about intuitive historiography in an invited lecture she gave on "Intuitive Historiography in the Archive" at UW-Madison's Center for the History of Print and Digital Culture. 

Dr. Spinner has completed the pilot episode of the television series Pixie, which is inspired by her academic expertise on Pamela Colman Smith and the Rider-Waite Tarot. Concurrently, she is writing a screenplay called Accessory Row, which depicts method acting as an often overlooked feminized practice through the figure of Elizabeth Taylor. This project emerged from another labor of love she has been working on for the past five years: an experimental photo-novel tentatively titled Mutant Beauty. In it, she explores the idea of tumultuous love via the famed love affair of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton through photographs, photographs of their photographs, excerpts from their love letters, and ephemera she has amassed and preserved from eBay listings

She has taken numerous workshops at the Center for Alternative Photography in New York City. These intensive workshops have changed the way she thinks and writes about photography and, as a scholar-artist, her work employs creative visual components.  She has presented examples of her photographic work at national academic conferences, such as the American Studies Association and the Association of Jewish Studies. She has also taken courses at the Center for Documentary Studies.

Her photographic work employs a variety of analog photographic techniques. Her cameras of choice include her Bolex, her Hasselblad, fondly named Hedy, her Holgaroid, and Polaroid Land Camera. 

She is an avid roller skater, a fan of film noir, and absolutely enamored with her cat Gilda, who is named after the Rita Hayworth film.

Check out her research blog, Electric Ladies Zap,  follow her on twitter (@electricladyzap), and/or find her photography at electriccameraszap.tumblr.com.