LaTara McLemore is the Education Content and Facilitation Lead at the Center for Socially Engaged Engineering and Design (C-SED). In this role, LaTara provides instructional support, workshop planning, and C-SED content revisions for C-SED staff and our team of Graduate Facilitators. As C-SED’s robust library of content is used throughout the many courses and majors in the College of Engineering, LaTara works to execute those detailed adaptations that make C-SED materials applicable across contexts.
Prior to her work at C-SED, LaTara taught in a variety of educational contexts and locations. Her first instructional job was in public education, as an 11th and 12th grade English teacher in Detroit, MI. Since those early years, LaTara has taught middle and high school in Chicago, IL; public humanities courses also in Chicago; and several semesters of English 125: Writing and Academic Inquiry, here at the University of Michigan, in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (LSA). From these rich and eclectic experiences, LaTara has learned that no matter who and where she teaches, her central investment always comes back to providing instruction that is engaging, supportive, and—most importantly—responsive to the needs of her students.
Outside of C-SED, LaTara is also a doctoral candidate in the English Language and Literature program here at the University of Michigan. Her research is in 20th century African American literature, where she studies speculative fictions by Black Women Writers after the Civil Rights Movement. Read through and alongside Diasporic Theory, Black Feminist Theory, Afropessimism, and theories of formalism, LaTara’s work asks how characterization reveals–and complicates–our understanding of the African American experience both in the recent past, and in our present.When not working, reading, or napping, you can find LaTara hanging out with her very mischievous cat, Nathaniel, and going on long walks near the Huron River.