Dr. Auvinen's work is focused on the cultural context of films and the ideas they circulate. Most recently, she has extended her study to popular culture forms in order to investigate what these artifact reflect about individual and societal ideology and values in addition to developing a class on narrative forms geared toward the first-year experience. Additionally, she is interested in the idea of place not only as a geographic narrative, but as a personal, social and psychological narrative in literature and film. However, her primary work is creative. Her memoir, Rough Beauty: Forty Seasons of Mountain Living, was published by Scribner in June, 2018, was finalist for the Colorado Book Award, and has been translated into Russian. A collection of short stories about outliers in the West is forthcoming and she is working on a novel, Sister House, based on the life of her Finnish great Aunt who was institutionalized in 1933 in North Dakota. She writes the Substack A Woman's Place Is in the Wild and is the Poet Laureate of Nederland, CO.
keywords
storytelling, pop culture, film studies, film analysis, media studies, American literature, Nature writing, literary analysis, creative writing - poetry, fiction, nonfiction, novel
