Bernard F. Stehle, M.A.

714 S. 15th St.
Philadelphia, PA 19146-2101, USA
Phone: 267-250-6527

AND

Associate Professor of English
Community College of Philadelphia
1700 Spring Garden St.
Philadelphia, PA 19130-3991
Phone: 215-751-8945
Email: bernardstehle@gmail.com, bstehle@comcast.net

Bernard F. Stehle, M.A., is an associate professor of English at Community College of Philadelphia (CCP), where he has been teaching critical thinking and writing since 1979, his focus being on strategies related to teaching the research essay, the second of two required writing courses. Students in his classes compare and contrast differences of opinion among experts on critical sociopolitical and bioethical issues in American society, such as same-sex marriage and adoption, human reproductive cloning, euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide, disability rights and human sexuality, contested definitions (internationally as well as nationally) of controversial concepts such as personhood, genocide, terrorism, gender, race), and so forth. 

A photographer and poet, Bernard has also taught history of photography at CCP and at the International Center of Photography (ICP) in New York City; he is the author of two books of social-documentary photography that integrate his professional and personal passions: the international award-winning Incurably Romantic (Temple U. Press, 1985), his portraits and interviews of severely physically disabled couples at Inglis House, an institution (“Home for Incurables” at the time) in Philadelphia; and Another Kind of Witness (Jewish Publication Society, 1988), his portraits and interviews of attendees at the International Gathering of Holocaust Survivors, in Philadelphia in 1985, a project that inspired his further, specialized research (1988-91) in Israel, Hungary, and England, where he made portraits and conducted extensive, in-depth interviews of twenty-five of the twins who survived Mengele’s medical experiments at Auschwitz. 

As a member of the board of consulting editors, Bernard has published photographs and essays in SPRING: The Journal of the E. E. Cummings Society, and has regularly presented scholarly papers and chaired panels on the poet at the annual conference of the American Literature Association, the umbrella organization of which the E. E. Cummings Society is a founding member. A volume of Bernard’s poetry, The Pumpkin’s Grin: Haiku, Senryu, and Other Three-line Poems, will be published in 2016, a prelude to his longer work-in-progress “The Rainman” and Other Poems. 

Bernard is also a professional editor and copyeditor (“The Next-to-Last Word”), specializing in academic manuscripts in anthropology and the humanities. A moderate realist in philosophy, a born-again atheist in religion, and a peripatetic photographer and poetic flaneur in disposition, Bernard’s interest in social constructionism is the linguistic and philosophical coherence at stake in its worldview and acceptance. He is keen to contribute and learn from befriending and collaborating with others as a new Taos associate.