Get news & events by emailProgram in Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy
Faculty:
We support research in:
· Composition theory & pedagogy
· Computers and composition
· Genre theory
· History of Rhetoric
· Multimedia Composition
· New Media/Digital Rhetoric and Composition
· Rhetoric of Science
· Technology Studies
· Visual rhetoric
· Women’s Rhetorics
· Writing in the Disciplines
· Writing Program Administration
Graduate students specializing in this area join a lively, interdisciplinary community, often choosing courses in English as well as in Education, Communication Studies, Anthropology, Philosophy, or Library and Information Sciences. Our collaborations with rhetoric faculty in Communication Studies are especially productive; graduate students have worked with Bill Balthrop, Carole Blair, Christian Lundberg, and Sarah Sharma, especially, taking courses in the History of Rhetoric, Kenneth Burke, Rhetorical Criticism, Rhetorics of Public Memory, and Media Theory.
Our students work closely together in a supportive environment, meeting bi-weekly for a writing group. Faculty frequently lead reading groups and independent studies so that students can customize their program of study according to their research interests.
Graduate students also receive training in teaching and writing program administration, often taking on roles as Graduate Assistant to the Director of Composition or to the Director of the Writing in the Disciplines program. Advanced graduate students finish with a range of teaching experience, including tutoring in the Writing Center, teaching specialized Writing in the Disciplines (WID) courses, and mentoring other teaching assistants.
In the past five years, graduates of our program have gone on to tenure track or post-doctoral positions at Duke University, Michigan State University, the University of Carolina-Greensboro, Georgia Institute of Technology, and Stanford University. Our students have also won prestigious awards and fellowships, including the CCCC James Berlin Memorial Dissertation Award (Risa Applegarth), the RSA Dissertation of the Year Award (Sarah Hallenbeck), and an honorable mention for the CCCC Dissertation Award in Technical Communication (Sarah Hallenbeck).
Seminars Offered
· Changing Academic Practices: New Forms of Writing and Pedagogy
· Contemporary American Autobiography
· Electronic Pedagogy in Literature and Composition
· Genre, Voice, Action
· Genre and Agency
· History of Rhetoric
· Invention and the Rhetoric of Science
· Rhetorical Theory and Practice
· Rhetoric and Civil Rights
· Storyforms, Pedagogy and Digital Composition
· Teaching with Technology in the Humanities
· Women’s Rhetorics
Recent Dissertations, Awards, and Placements
· Risa Applegarth, Other Grounds: Popular Genres and the Rhetoric of Anthropology, 1900-1940 (2009). 2010 James Berlin Memorial Award winner. Assistant professor, University of North Carolina, Greensboro.
· Sarah Hallenbeck, New Women in Transit: The Rhetorical Bicycle in the 1890s, (2009). 2010 CCCC Dissertation Award in Technical Communication, honorable mention. Post-doctoral Fellow, Duke University.
· Melissa Meeks, Between Abolition and Reform: First-year writing programs, e-literacies, and institutional change (2006). Post-Doctoral Fellow, Georgia Institute of Technology.
· Bump Halbritter, Sound Arguments: Aural Rhetoric in Multimedia Composition (2004). Assistant professor, Michigan State University.
