cynthiasite

Welcome to cynthiasite.net, the academic website of Cynthia Eaton. (For those of you wondering what happened to "Cynthia Villanti," after getting married on July 7, 2007, I decided to go back to my maiden name for professional purposes.)

About Me

I'm an Associate Professor of English on the beautiful Eastern Campus of Suffolk Community College (Long Island, NY). I've taught at Suffolk CC since Fall 2004: the first year on the Grant Campus in Brentwood, and since then on the Eastern Campus in Riverhead.

If you'd like to get in touch, you can contact me:

• by email, by phone, or by mail: here's my contact information, or
• by foot, or by chat: here's my schedule of classes and office hours.

Before moving to Long Island, I taught full time at Mohawk Valley Community College (1998-2004), where I was active in the Professional Association and where I was awarded the SUNY Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Teaching (2003). I also taught as an adjunct at Pratt at Munson Williams Proctor Arts Institute (2000-2004) and at Utica College of Syracuse University (1997-1998).

Before moving back to upstate New York (I grew up in Ithaca, which as upstaters know, is gorges), I did my graduate work in the English Department of the University of Massachusetts Amherst. UMass Amherst is an amazing, beautiful, diverse college in Western Mass, and I truly benefited as an educator from teaching in the nationally renowned Writing Program from 1994-1997, fortunately before Peter Elbow retired.

As an undergraduate, I stayed fairly close to home as an English major at SUNY Cortland, and I am still incredibly indebted to Dr. Karla Alwes, who not only shaped my professional interests but encouraged me to enroll in the MA/PhD program at UMass Amherst.

I currently live in the middle of Suffolk County, Long Island. My partner Sean and I purchased a lovely home here in a bucolic area that feels very much like upstate to me—and we were married on 07/07/07, and, yes, at 7 p.m. When not teaching, reading, or writing, my two sons keep me very busy.

About this Website

This website formerly served as the class website for my online ENG101  (Standard Freshman Composition) course at Suffolk, but since the college moved to Desire2Learn as its course management system, I migrated all of my materials there. This website now provides student resources for writing, literature, and research and materials for the other classes that I teach at Suffolk. In addition, this site hosts distance education advice and information for faculty as well as a distance education blog. Access any of these materials via the Site Sections above or use the menu at left. Links to subsections will appear within each area.

I created this website using Drupal, an open source content management system (CMS). I know that colleagues and students may be more familiar with systems such as Blackboard/WebCT or the SUNY Learning Network (SLN); however, I believe that this system is not only far superior to those but also more valuable precisely because it is open source (for those unfamiliar with the open source movement, Wikipedia offers a nice definition of OS).

Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions about this site.