Workshop Speakers and Mentor Faculty Members 2016

Professor Emily Cope

Emily Cope is an Assistant Professor of Rhetoric and Composition  at York College of Pennsylvania, specializing in rhetoric, religion, and writing. She also serves as the coordinator for YCP's discipline-specific advanced written, oral, and visual communication courses. She love teaching writing and rhetoric and, while she teaches a variety of courses, in each class her goal is to empower students to make effective and ethical interventions in issues they care about. Her scholarly interests center on rhetorical education, pedagogy, public discourse, and religious rhetorics, and she is especially interested in American evangelicals' rhetorical practices and how those practices are shaped by their educational experiences. Her current projects include a qualitative study of evangelical undergraduates' academic writing and a mixed-methods study of writing teacher preparation.

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Professor Katherine Cottle

Creating Your Own Search Engine: How do you begin/process/formulate/complete research for an area that does not have standardized searching venues? My recent book-length work, "The Hidden Heart of Baltimore: Remapping the City through Intimate Letters" required the use of established, experimental, and flexible research methods to locate, define, process, and include intimate letters by residential and visiting Baltimore correspondents. Researching "love" is very challenging and exciting!

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Professor Cynthia Crimmins

Hello, Student Researchers, I am eager to work with you to help you create new knowledge to add to our discipline. My research experience is in writing center work, academic support programs (tutors, supplemental instruction), ELL, faculty development, and assessment. The methods I've typically used include artifact analysis, observations, interviews, surveys, and focus groups. My professional presentations have been about supporting writing center tutors, collaborating with units across campus, and creating frameworks for reaching goals. I hope you find some of my expertise useful to tap into as you develop your research questions and methodology.

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Professor Matthew Davis

Professor Davis' research explores how we can better teach college students to learn to write and to create other kinds of texts (audio, video, web, etc.) that incorporate writing. To do this research, he focuses on three things: one, how students use and think about technology; two, how teachers and educators design courses and curricula; and three, how students take what they learn  and do in those courses and transfer it in other contexts. 

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Professor Catherine DeLazzero

Catherine DeLazzero is a Ph.D. candidate in English education at Teachers College, Columbia University. Her research focuses on the “consequential validity” of writing assessments and diversity in students’ approaches to writing (using surveys, interviews, think aloud writing protocols, content analysis and other methods). She also leads writing workshops for families in her community, serves as a writing mentor for Pen America’s Prison Writing Program, and serves as a member of Community Board 7/Manhattan, where she coordinates a task force on inclusive playgrounds. Earlier in her career, she coordinated the Writing Center at The College of New Rochelle and taught writing at high schools in the Bronx and Cape Town, South Africa.

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Professor Dominic DelliCarpini

Dominic DelliCarpini is currently the Dean of the Center for Community Engagement and The Naylor Endowed Professor of Writing Studies at York College of Pennsylvania. Before his current appointment, he served for 5 years as York College’s Chief Academic Officer, and 13 years as WPA, where he led a first-year curriculum redesign and developed a successful major in Professional Writing, now in its 12th year. DelliCarpini has served in a number of leadership positions within the national Council of Writing Program Administrators and other organizations in the discipline. He is currently an officer of the Conference on College Composition and Communication (Secretary), a WPA Consultant Evaluator, and serves on the CCCC Committees on the Writing Major and Undergraduate Research.  He has also served as a WPA Executive Board member, and held leadership positions on initiatives such as the WPA Network for Media Action and the National Conversation on Writing.  He also has twice led the WPA Summer Workshop, and acts as a reviewer for the WPA journal and CCC. DelliCarpini’s numerous publications and presentations have focused upon WPA work, civic engagement (including his book, Composing a Life’s Work: Writing, Citizenship, and your Occupation), writing majors, and undergraduate research in writing centers. DelliCarpini has also edited two composition textbooks: Conversations: Readings for Writers and Issues: Readings in Academic Disciplines, and is currently completing work on the 11th edition of the Prentice Hall Guide to Writin with Dr. Stephen Reid, to be published in early 2106. He serves on the Board of Directors for the York County Community Foundation and the Cultural Alliance of York County, and Chairs the Moving Plans into Action Advisory Board for Downtown, Inc. in York City.  

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Professor Timothy R. Dougherty

I am interested in the ways that stories about the past are strategically created to do public work in the present. I am interested in the ways that rhetorical researchers can help to construct better, more complete stories of the past that will better serve social justice movements of the present. And I am interested in understanding the ways that (and perhaps the limits of) our work as scholars can serve both scholarly and activist communities.

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Professor Jenn Fishman

Jenn Fishman is a rhetoric and composition scholar who keeps her plate full. Over the past fifteen years she has been involved in three longitudinal or multi-year studies of college writing: the Stanford Study (2001-6), the Embodied Literacies Project (2005-7), and Kenyon Writes (2011-13). Her scholarship includes those projects plus subjects like performance, intellectual property, and mentoring, and she has edited watershed issues of two online journals: CCC Online (2012) and, with Jess Enoch, Peitho 18.1 (Fall/Winter 2015). Last spring she started the Undergraduate Research Impact Project with Jane Greer and Dominic DelliCarpini, and she launched REx or the Research Exchange Index, a database where all writing researchers—including undergraduates—can report on their work. Currently she is the Immediate Past President of the Coalition of Feminist Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition, Co-Chair of the CCCC Committee on Undergraduate Research, and Director of Marquette's First-Year English Program.

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Professor William Fitzgerald

At Rutgers-Camden, I work in the areas of religious rhetorics and research-based writing, including as co-author of the new edition of the Craft of Research and the Turabian guides. I'm interested in the pedagogy of style and argument, in visual rhetoric, and in the introduction of research methods (e.g., archival, ethnographic) into undergraduate rhetoric/writing curricula. In my teaching, I work with students in all my courses to develop projects that have the potential to be shared with others in posters and papers and I have presented and published on research and mentoring.

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Professor Mara Lee Grayson

I have been teaching composition, technical and creative writing, and literacy theory and pedagogy on the undergraduate and graduate levels for the past six years. I hold an MFA in Creative Writing and am a PhD candidate in the field of English Education. My dissertation  investigates socially conscious discourse practices in the FYC classroom. I have presented qualitative studies on composition pedagogy, creative writing, classroom culture, and racial literacy at NCTE, CCCC, and other national conferences. I primarily use case study and ethnographic methodologies because I believe that every classroom develops a unique culture.
Courses I teach emphasize writing and research as situated, hands-on, dynamic practices. When I teach methodology, I emphasize the need for the researcher to consciously select the approach that best suits the question(s) at hand and to modify as needed. While we cover archival approaches and literature reviews, my students also use participant observation and conduct interviews and surveys.

 

Professor Jane Greer

Jane Greer is professor of English and Women's & Gender Studies at U of Missouri, Kansas City, and she serves as UMKC's Director of Undergrad. Research & Creative Scholarship.  From 2008 to 2014, she served as editor of Young Scholars in Writing.
Much of Jane's research focuses on the history of women's rhetoric, and she is particularly interested in how voices  from the past can help us understand our current moment as teachers, students, and activists. She has published on Marian Wharton, who taught English at a socialist correspondence school in the early part of the 20th century; on   Myrtle Tenney Booth, a farm woman in West Virginia in the early 20th century who used her autobiography to insist on the value of her work to the community; and on the diary of Pat Huyett, a high school student who wrote extensively about her experiences in English classes in the 1960s.  Jane supplements this historical work with mixed method research (e.g., focus groups, surveys, bibliometrics, content-analysis) about current trends in higher education, including concerns about access to college for students from under-represented groups &  high school/college transitions and about undergraduate research as a high impact educational  practice.
Jane's focus as a teacher is on taking students into new spaces, such as archives, museums, and memorials, where they can make their own connections between the past the present.  Her favorite classes to teach include  Women & Rhetoric; Rhetorics of Public Memory; True Lives:  Autobiographical Acts & Artifacts; and Girls & Print Culture.

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Professor Alexis Hart

My most recent focus as a scholar has been military veterans and writing, with a focus on public advocacy for veterans in higher education in general and writing courses in particular. I conduct this research through surveys, interviews, archival research, and literature reviews. I have presented my research at CCCCs, the Thomas R. Watson conference, the Computers and Writing conference, and the International Writing Across the Curriculum conference, among others. My work has been published in Kairos, Composition Forum, Writing on the Edge (WOE), and several anthologies, including Generation Vet: Composition, Student Veterans, and the Post-9/11 University. I serve as an NCTE/CCCC Policy Analyst for Higher Education in Pennsylvania, and I am on the editorial boards of Kairos and The Peer Review.

 

Professor Ethna Lay

We are writing in a digital age – what some have termed the Late Age of Print.  I’m not nostalgic for the page – I still keep print texts about me — but I am enthusiastic about the possibilities that writing in digital spaces affords.
I teach writing and history of the English language at Hofstra University.  I am really intrigued by the changing nature of literacy during our digital times.  Be prepared to experiment with (and investigate the effects of)  new media composing and to use digital tools to help solve research problems if you research with me. Because blogging impacts writing in important ways, all of my students blog.  My study of student writing on blogs and in a wide range of multimodal compositions results in some very convincing results (both textual and visual) about digital literacy. 

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Professor Alison Lukowski

Assistant Professor, hails from the northern shore of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, and comes to CBU from Chicagoland and Northern Illinois University. She received her B.A. in English and Political Science from Alma College, her M.A. in English Literature from Loyola University Chicago, and her Ph.D. in Rhetoric and Composition from Northern Illinois University. She teaches first-year composition, business communication, and writing for digital media. Alison’s research focuses how rhetoric shapes the development of new media. Currently, she is working on an article about genre and gender in Wikipedia. She is also working on her book project about the rhetoric of revolution in new media discourse. Her research interests include: digital rhetoric, new media studies, history of rhetoric, women and rhetoric, and first-year composition.

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Professor Jessie Moore

Jessie L. Moore is associate director of the Center for Engaged Learning and associate professor of English: Professional Writing & Rhetoric. She oversees the Center’s research seminars, which support multi-institutional inquiry on topics like undergraduate research, study abroad, internships, and learning communities. Her recent research examines transfer of writing knowledge and practices, writing residencies for faculty writers, the writing lives - and writing technologies - of university students, and high-impact pedagogies. She has conducted quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods studies, using research methods such as surveys, interviews, discourse analysis, focus groups, and meta-analysis.

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Professor Lana Oweidat

Lana Oweidat is an Assistant Professor of English and  Director of the Writing Center at Goucher College. She has taught courses in writing, rhetoric, and women’s, gender, and sexuality Studies. Her research focuses on transnational feminist rhetorics and how they challenge and broaden the understanding of cultures, texts, and identities. She has presented at CCCC, The Thomas R. Watson Conference, Rhetoric Society of America, College English, Feminisms and Rhetorics, and is currently working on an article that tackles anti-Islamophobia rhetoric and pedagogy, utilizing feminist research methods. She is also conducting qualitative research on cultural negotiation and classroom legitimacy in relation to second language writing teachers.

 

Professor Barbara Roswell

For over thirty years, Professor Roswell has been teaching writing at Goucher College, where she has also directed the Writing Program, Writing Center, First Year Seminars, and WAC.  Much of the work she is most excited by engages (and connects undergraduates with) writers beyond the campus -- in prisons, retirement communities, after-school programs, etc., and as editor of Reflections she enjoyed working with established and  emerging scholars to foster the "the public turn" in composition.  In fact, Goucher College now teaches a full college curriculum in several nearby prisons.  Her dissertation focused on the construction of authority in Goucher's peer-staffed writing center, and her early research focused on writing assessment and literacy and gender.  She finds there is nothing quite like the excitement of developing a research question, choosing a methodological approach, and beginning to see patterns and meaning in one's data. Barbara is the author of Reading, Writing and Gender (2002), Writing and Community Engagement (2010), and Turning Teaching Inside Out (2013).

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Professor Deneen Senasi

I serve as Writing Program Director at Mercer University, where I work we have a program of embedded undergraduate writing tutors called preceptors.  I design and implement preceptors' training, and it is in this area that my work and research lies. Since many of our faculty aren't trained in writing pedagogy, our preceptors fill a crucial role in facilitating student writing in and out of the classroom. So my work focuses on ways to prepare preceptors -- what they need to know and what they need to practice -- to support writing instruction in the class and how we as faculty can learn from their unique perspective as we conceptualize our writing courses. In teaching preceptors, they continually teach me about what it means to teach writing. My current project looks at how re-imagining conventional classroom boundaries can create communities of writers across sections, offering students more feedback and support, thus enriching their study of academic writing.    

 

Professor Michelle Smith

I am a feminist rhetoricians who studies rhetorics of gendered work--the rhetorical construction of particular jobs, workplaces, and tasks as masculine or feminine. My book project explores how 19th century utopian communities revised gendered notions of work, relying largely on archival research from the communities themselves. I have also written about gender and work in relation to Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign and government efforts to recruit women into factory work in WWII. These projects often employ the rhetorical theories of Kenneth Burke and of material rhetoric--how rhetoric operates through spaces, bodies, time, and objects, not just through words.
A second strand of my research addresses undergraduate writing. Specifically, I've written about the role of the undergraduate writing major and about how Learning Management Systems (LMSs) like Blackboard, Angel, Canvas, etc shape students' interaction with instructor feedback on their writing.

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Professor Anissa Sorokin

I've always been interested in learning about people by looking at what they say and how they say it--that's why I decided to pursue graduate studies in sociolinguistics. In the past, I've examined how language serves as a marker of identity, particularly ethnic identity. I got to use my knowledge and skills first-hand when I worked for the Census Bureau, where I designed and tested survey question variations with people from different linguistic and cultural groups. More recently, since I began teaching college, my interest in multimodal composing has grown. In particular, I'm currently studying how music can be used to inspire written texts and become a part of compositions in the college writing classroom.  My data comes from a class I taught, so I spent a lot of time collecting and coding student artifacts, interviews, and my own field notes. My dissertation is based on this research and focuses on the positive effects of using a music-centered English 100 curriculum. In the future, I'm hoping to publish a book or article with ideas for teachers who would like to use music in their own classes in creative ways.

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Professor Kara Taczak

Kara Taczak is a Teaching Assistant Professor at the University of Denver. She has conducted several mixed-methods studies on the following topics: dual enrollment, reflection, first-year writing, and transfer of knowledge. Her research centers most on the transfer of writing knowledge and practices – the idea that knowledge and pracitces can move forward from one writing context to another -- and strives to test the efficacy of a teaching for transfer curriculum in first year writing. The curriculum, called Teaching for Transfer (TFT), includes three signature components: (1) key terms; (2) systematic reflective practice; (3) and students' development of a theory of writing. Taczak’s current research project, The Transfer of a Transfer Curriculum, now in it’s 3rd iteration, seeks to move towards generalizability with the TFT curriculum by looking at five different kinds of campuses, including two four-year campuses and three two-year campuses. The aim of the project is two-fold: (1) to compare the TFT curriculum to more standard composition offerings across the five campuses and (2) to explore the efficacy of the TFT curriculum with a wider set of students, college courses, and writing situations. As a result of her work with transfer, Taczak has written and been awarded several grants, attended national and regional conferences, and published several articles and book chapters as well as the award winning book, Writing Across Contexts: Transfer, Composition, and Sites of Writing. 

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Angela Glotfelter

 

I'm a graduate student in composition and rhetoric and Miami University of Ohio. I'm really interested in research in Professional Writing/Technical Communication, research in local communities, and feminist research practices.

 

Megan Schoettler

I am currently a Master's student in Rhetoric and Composition at Miami University, and a previous undergraduate research at York College of Pennsylvania. I work from feminist methodologies, and my methods include surveys, focus groups, discourse analysis, interviews, and archival research (almost always mixed-methods). My primary research areas are student dispositions (in first-year composition and the writing center) and imperial rhetorics and indigenous resistance. More specifically, I study writer self-efficacy as well the ongoing nuclear testing struggles in the Marshall Islands (and the interesting intersections of these topics). I have presented at conferences such as at MAWCA (regional writing center), IWCA, CCCC, and the Wright State Race, Gender, and Sexuality Symposium.

Graduate Mentors