Joanne Detore-Nakamura earned her Ph.D. at Southern Illinois University and now teaches humanities at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Florida.

The following biography is from her Embry-Riddle website:

"Dr. Joanne Detore-Nakamura has been teaching at the college-level since 1990. She is currently an assistant professor of Humanities and Social Sciences at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University where she teaches courses such as mass communications, communications, humanities, and others. Prior to her arrival at ERAU, she was a tenured, full professor, a former department chair, and a finalist for Distinguished Educator who taught from 1995 to 2002 at Brevard Community College in Melbourne, FL. At Brevard, she piloted the first women's history month celebration, designed and offered the first women's literature course, and designed and facilitated the first gender/diversity faculty and staff training courses at the community college in Melbourne. She looks forward to helping ERAU do the same.

Before she began her doctoral work, Dr. Detore-Nakamura worked in the field of public relations, working as a director of public relations for a regional non-profit agency in NY and later as an account executive at a technical PR firm in Rhode Island. She decided to leave PR to teach and to impact the lives of young people more directly. It was one of the best decisions that she ever made.

Dr. Detore-Nakamura's teaching and work in women's history has been recognized by her inclusion in several additions of Who's Who Among America's Teachers and in the Who's Who of American Women 2002 edition. Her creative work has been published in such journals as Purdue's Voices in Italian Americana and York University's Journal of the Association of Research on Motherings (ARM) and will be anthologized in the book, Sicilian Voices. Additionally, she has given a number of papers on muliticultural and women's literature at conferences such as the International Virginia Woolf Conference, the 20th Century Literature Conference, the League of Innovations, the Irish Studies Conference, and the Midwest MLA in addition to facilitating a number of diversity workshops.

Dr. Detore-Nakamura was a university fellow at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, where she earned her Ph.D. in American Literature and Women's Studies, winning a number of research awards including one for best research paper written by a graduate student in English and another the most promising dissertation proposal, which recognized her groundbreaking theory called the "friendship plot" in contemporary women's novels.

Her most recent research interest is mothering and motherhood. Currently, she is co-editing an anthology of original essays about working mothers and childcare issues throughout the 20th century and presented the work-in-progress at an ARM conference in Toronto this year. She also has a quirky passion for monsters and gothic literature. From her course, Literary and Film Monsters, she has combined her research on mothering with her passion for monsters in a paper entitled, "Mothering the Monster: Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel" for presentation at the Popular Culture Association's Conference this year.

She absolutely loves teaching and strives to make her classes a combination of fun and learning for the non-English major at Embry-Riddle. In addition to her full-time career, she shares her life with her husband and their four-year old daughter in the Daytona Beach area.