Faculty Spotlight: Stacy Bell McQuaide 89Ox

“I was underwhelmed in high school, and college opened my mind to what learning could really be like,” she recalls.  “Volunteering with Chaplain Sammy Clark and joining classmates for the 1987 Brotherhood March in Forsyth inspired me to a life of service. My two years at Oxford formed me into the person I am today.” 

That formative experience brought her back to Oxford; this time as an educator determined to offer her students the same kind of transformation. Since the beginning of her tenure, Bell has shaped the college’s writing curriculum and inspired generations of students to find their voices through language. She brings both warmth and wit to her work – a mindset that has defined her thirty-year career of asking hard questions and challenging assumptions about language and learning. 

“I love working with young people—it’s the great honor of my life.”  

Her students feel the same way. Bell has received numerous honors for teaching excellence, including the Mizell Award, the Emory Women of Excellence Award, and the Emory Williams Distinguished Undergraduate Teaching Award. She says the recognition means the most when it comes from students. “When they nominated me, I felt like what I do really matters,” she says. 

Championing Multilingual Voices 

As Director of Multilingual Writing, Bell has led efforts to make Oxford’s writing program more inclusive and equitable. Her goals, she explains, were to ensure students’ “language needs were being met,” and to change how linguistic diversity is valued across campus. 

“There was a time when international students were sometimes excluded from opportunities due to perceived language ‘deficits,’ and I pushed hard to end those practices,” she says. Through faculty development and advocacy, Bell helped shift the narrative to one that celebrates multilingualism as an asset, not a barrier. 

Teaching for the Times 

Bell’s approach to teaching first-year writing continues to evolve with the changing academic landscape—including the growing influence of AI. 

“I’m not an ‘AI doomer,’ but I don’t think generative AI is having a positive impact on student learning,” she says. “That’s why my students are writing by hand this semester—in Blue Books, during class. My focus now is on process rather than product.” 

By emphasizing thought development over polished output, Bell hopes to combat what she calls “cognitive offloading.” “I want students to generate their own answers—even bad answers,” she says. Her students get it! They shared, “Critical thinking is a muscle that has to be exercised.” 

Learning Beyond the Classroom 

This spring, Bell will take a group of students to Poland as part of a course exploring Jewish life before the Holocaust. The trip will focus on what she calls “embodied learning”—connecting intellectual study to lived experience. 

“I want students to stand in the vast Jewish cemetery in Warsaw and contemplate the devastation that ended a thousand years of Jewish history,” she says. “But I also want them to see how people lived—to think about life as well as loss. Our guiding question will be: ‘As tourists, how do we participate responsibly in remembering the past?’” 

Literature as a Force for Change 

Bell believes deeply in the power of literature to shape society. As an adjunct faculty member for the Chillon Project—a liberal arts degree program for incarcerated students—alongside Mike McQuaide, she developed Novels for Social Change, a course exploring how fiction can inspire transformation. 

“We asked, ‘Can a work of fiction be an agent of social change?’” she says. “Now I teach a similar course at Oxford. Last spring, we read climate dystopias and talked about the grief we feel about climate chaos. Literature can help us imagine a better world—and confront the realities we face.” 

Global Connections and Lifelong Curiosity 

Bell’s passion for connection extends far beyond the classroom. Last summer, she traveled to the country of Georgia, with the assistance of two Oxford alumni and students she once taught. “If you know me, you know there’s a ‘before Georgia’ me and an ‘after Georgia’ me,” she says. “The food, the natural beauty, the generosity of the people—it’s captured my imagination entirely.” 

She plans to return next summer for the ZEG Storytelling Festival, which celebrates creativity and innovation. 

When she’s not teaching or traveling, Bell can be found at home “curled up with my cats and a novel, cooking for friends, or enjoying a glass of wine in a tiny village in Burgundy, France.” 

“I try to live what I teach,” she says. “Learning, storytelling, connection—these are the things that make life meaningful.”