Tess Casher: Scholar, Writer and Person who Stutters

Born in Canada, Tess Casher spent most of her childhood in Whitehorse, Yukon. She stuttered from a young age, and got help when she entered the treatment program at the Institute for Stuttering Research in Edmonton, Alberta – an experience that inspired her to write and publish a novel aimed at young people about a junior high school girl who stutters. While attending Mount Allison University in New Brunswick she was the recipient of numerous academic awards, and in 2023 she became her University’s 54th Rhodes Scholar, and moved to Oxford, England to continue work on her masters degree in Modern and contemporary English literature. She currently does graduate level teaching and research in the English and Film Studies Department of the University of Alberta, and she plans to apply to PhD programs to study how literary representations of speech disfluency contribute to or disentangle stammering stereotypes and how the stuttering approach to communication can provide new avenues into writing and the literary field.