Erin Cheslow is an assistant professor of English at Cedar Crest College and director of a successful pilot high school program at Danville Correctional Center in Illinois, the first of its kind. In February 2025, she successfully defended her dissertation in the Departments of American Indian Studies and English, with a certificate in criticism and interpretative theory, at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. As an educator, she works with students in literature and composition courses to help them achieve their writing, career, and personal goals. Her research focuses on Indigenous literatures and theory, with a particular focus on the Pacific. She received her MA from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.
Based on the method for reading as listening she developed in her dissertation, Prof. Cheslow’s newest project takes up material practices in the Pacific diaspora like tapa/kapa (a mulberry bark cloth or paper) that are also mneumonic for how they enact makawalu alongside other forms of knowledge transfer. Literally meaning “eight eyes,” makawalu as methodology brings together multiple ways of learning and knowing, multiple perspectives, in the search for and sharing of knowledge. This project, currently titled Woven Oralities: The Temporal and Spatial Mobility of Pacific Form, frames this relationship between weaving and writing as a foundation for understanding the ways in which orality is interwoven with complex systems of knowledge transfer that persist even in the wake of encounter. For instance, a chapter on kapa creation by Hawaiians in Chicago considers this ongoing practice as a continuation of a history of Pacific formal mobility. She began this work in her disseration, Trans-Pacific Soundscapes, which engages with Oceanic literatures to consider possibilities for listening-in-relation in settler colonies and to read texts written in moments of colonial encounter.
At Cedar Crest, she brings research and teaching together through a pedagogy that centers listening-in-relation as collaborative practice. Listening in realtion requires anyone who practices it to enter into relationships with the understanding that their own knowledge system does not define the limits of all that is knowable. In her work with students on campus and at Danville Correctional Center, she asks students to listen in relation to other texts and communities to challenge their own assumptions and biases and develop their research and writing pracitces. She also uses revision as a tool for helping students gain ownership over their own writing with the goal of entering a community of writers who are able to collaboratively develop ideas. She has taught classes in first-year composition, advanced writing, business writing, Indigenous literatures, British literatures, and public humanities.
In her free time, she spends time with her rescue rabbits – Sabrina, Selver, and Odo – and attempt to make the perfect cup of espresso.
Erin Cheslow 