Author Bios
Shawn Apostel is an assistant professor of communication and an instructional technology specialist at Bellarmine University, where he teaches multimedia and technical communication as well as provides support to faculty and IT to facilitate online and classroom instruction that incorporates technology. He received a PhD in Rhetoric and Technical Communication from Michigan Technological University in 2011. His recent publications include a co-edited book, Online Credibility and Digital Ethos: Evaluating Computer-Mediated Communication (with Moe Folk, 2012, IGI International), and a co-authored book Teaching Creative Thinking: A New Pedagogy for the 21st Century (2013, New Forums Press).
Estee Beck is an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Arlington in the Department of English. She received her PhD in English from the Rhetoric and Writing doctoral program at Bowling Green State University in 2015. Her research and teaching focuses on digital surveillance and computer algorithms, identity and technology, and digital rhetoric and literacy. Her work has appeared in Computers and Composition, Hybrid Pedagogy, and Computers and Composition Online.
Kristine L. Blair is professor of English at Bowling Green State University, where she teaches graduate courses in digital rhetoric and scholarly publication in the Rhetoric and Writing program. Her articles and chapters on gender and technology, eportfolios, online learning, and digital scholarship have appeared in numerous journals and collections, and she is co-editor of Webbing Cyberfeminist Practice (2008, Hampton Press) and Feminist Cyberscapes (1999, Hampton Press), along with several textbooks. Blair currently serves as editor of both the international print journal Computers and Composition and its separate companion journal Computers and Composition Online. She is a recipient of the CCCC Technology Innovator Award and the Computers and Composition Charles Moran Award for Distinguished Contributions to the Field.
Brandy Ball Blake is a communication specialist for Georgia Tech's Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, where she both teaches and coaches students on technical communication. Formerly the Associate Director of Georgia Tech's Communication Center, she worked with students both in the Center and in the classroom on improving communication skills, managed day-to-day operations, developed numerous workshops, and spearheaded projects. Her first-year composition textbook, Monsters, examines various definitions of monstrosity to inspire intriguing multimodal composition assignments (with L. Andrew Cooper, 2012, Fountainhead Press). Her primary areas of study are technical communication, comic books, visual rhetoric, Victorian literature, sci-fi/fantasy, and children's literature.
Beth Brunk-Chavez is the Senior Associate Dean of Extended University at the University of Texas at El Paso. She is also an associate professor of Rhetoric and Writing Studies and directed the First-Year Composition program for five years. Her research interests are in writing and technology, teaching and technology, student persistence, assessment, and writing program administration. Her research has been published in Writing Program Administration, Composition Studies, Written Communication, and in several edited collections. Brunk-Chavez received the University of Texas Regent's Outstanding Teaching Award in 2009 and was named to the University of Texas System Academy of Distinguished Teachers in 2013.
Rebecca E. Burnett is Director of Writing and Communication at Georgia Institute of Technology. She holds an endowed professorship in Georgia Tech's School of Literature, Media, and Communication. Her research includes risk communication, collaboration, technical communication, assessment, multimodality, MOOCs, digital pedagogies, and visual literacies. Her interest in international communication has led to work in countries including Canada, Japan, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, and South Africa. She has given more than 600 presentations and workshops and is an expert witness in product liability cases, dealing with adequacy of text, visuals, and information design.
Russell G. Carpenter directs the Noel Studio for Academic Creativity at Eastern Kentucky University, where he is also an assistant professor of English. He received a PhD in Texts & Technology from the University of Central Florida in 2009. His recent publications include a co-edited special issue of the Community Literacy Journal on community literacy and digital technologies and an edited collection, Cases on Higher Education Spaces (2012, IGI Global). He also co-edited The Routledge Reader on Writing Centers and New Media (2013).
Lance Cummings is an assistant professor of English at the University of North Carolina Wilmington where he teaches courses in professional and technical writing. He specializes in comparative rhetoric, translingual composition, and professional writing. He recently defended his dissertation, which focuses on translingual histories in composition, specifically in the early 20th-century YMCA. Cummings has received several awards for his scholarship, including the Excellence in Graduate Scholarship Award at Indiana University in Fort Wayne and the Spiro-Peterson Award for Excellence in Graduate Scholarship at Miami University. His most recent publication appeared in The Journal of Rhetoric, Professional Communication, and Globalization.
Andréa D. Davis is an assistant professor of Rhetoric and Composition at the Tri-Cities branch campus of Washington State University, where she teaches traditional and digital rhetorics as well as professional and technical writing. Her interdisciplinary work across cultural rhetorics, digital rhetorics, composition, and administration results in scholarship that employs cultural rhetorical analyses of digital and material texts. Her research investigates traditional discursive contexts, and rhetorical analysis of narratives in context.
Celeste Del Russo is a PhD candidate in Rhetoric, Composition, and the Teaching of English at the University of Arizona. She has worked as a writing tutor, mentor, tutor-training coordinator, and most recently as a graduate assistant at the THINK TANK at the University of Arizona. She has organized writing centers in diverse learning settings, ranging from grassroots, student-run writing initiatives to those housed in student learning centers. Her research interests include localized pedagogies, public memory studies, and the archive. She is the co-creator of the Writing After Katrina Archive Project and writer and contributor for the Katrina Narrative Project.
Dànielle Nicole DeVoss is a professor of Professional Writing at Michigan State University. Her research interests include digital–visual rhetorics; feminist interpretations of and interventions in computer technologies; and intellectual property issues in digital space. DeVoss' work has most recently appeared in Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy; Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture; and College English. Her recent books include Because Digital Writing Matters (with Elyse Eidman-Aadahl and Troy Hicks, 2010, Jossey-Bass); Copy(write): Intellectual Property in the Writing Classroom (with Martine Courant Rife and Sean Slattery, 2012, Parlor Press); Understanding and Creating Multimodal Projects (2012, Bedford/St. Martin's); Digital Writing Assessment and Evaluation (with Heidi McKee, 2013, CCDP/Utah State University Press); and Cultures of Copyright (with Martine Courant Rife, 2014, Peter Lang).
Amanda Fields is a PhD candidate in Rhetoric, Composition, and the Teaching of English at the University of Arizona. She is a scholar with the Ford Foundation-funded Crossroads Collaborative, and her research focuses on youth slam poetry and activism in Arizona. She co-edited Toward, Around, and Away From Tahrir: Tracking Emerging Expressions of Egyptian Identity (2014, Cambridge Scholars Publishing) and has published in Sexuality Research and Social Policy. Her creative work has been published in journals such as Indiana Review, Brevity, Nashville Review, and Superstition Review.
Andy Frazee is the Associate Director of the Writing and Communication Program at Georgia Tech. His research focuses on contemporary poetry, particularly the relationship between poetry and digital culture; multimodal pedagogy and assessment in composition, business communication, and technical communication; and MOOCs. He is the author of a book of poetry, The Body, The Rooms (2011, Subito Press) and reviews poetry for publications such as The Kenyon Review Online and Verse.
Renea Frey is a PhD student in Composition and Rhetoric at Miami University, focusing on women’s rhetorical and composing practices, especially those enacted by American women in the latter half of the 19th century. Frey examines rhetorics of the public sphere and the potential for parrhesiastic action to facilitate agency among those who may have difficulty accessing conventional rhetorical platforms. She is also interested in multimodal composing, research blogging, and online pedagogical spaces for their potentials to expand traditional notions of collaboration and pedagogy.
Dana C. Gierdowski is the Senior Program Coordinator for the Writing Excellence Initiative at Elon University, where she manages projects for the Writing Center and the Writing Across the University program. Prior to this position, she served as a visiting assistant professor of Composition and Rhetoric at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Her research explores how innovative, technology-rich learning spaces impact student writers and instructors. She has published in Cases on Higher Education Spaces (2012, IGI Global) and in Computers and Composition.
Mariana Grohowski is a PhD candidate in Rhetoric and Writing at Bowling Green State University. Inspired by feminisms, multimodality, trauma and veteran studies, Grohowski's dissertation, At War with Words, examines male and female, current and former U.S. military-service personnel's multimodal composing practices for making and sharing knowledge (read as rhetoric).
Christine Hamel-Brown began coordinating the University of Arizona's Writing Center in January 2007, staying on as it moved to its new home when the THINK TANK (the University’s student learning center) was created in August 2009. She taught first-year writing at the UA for nineteen years, and also taught writing online for eight years at the Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth. As the WC's first full-time coordinator in over seven years, Hamel-Brown is focused on developing the center's online presence and support for both non-native English speakers and graduate students, as well as re-integrating the center into the wider writing center community.
Karen Head is the Director of the Communication Center at Georgia Tech and an assistant professor in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication. Since 2006, she has been a visiting scholar at Technische University-Dortmund, Germany, where she serves as the primary consultant for their academic center. Her research focuses on writing and communication theory and pedagogical practice, especially in implementation and development of writing centers; writing program administration; communication ecologies; technical communication; business communication; multidisciplinary communication; MOOCs; and creative writing (especially as it applies to risk-taking in subsequent communication projects). She is the author of four collections of poetry.
Ryan Ireland is a PhD student in Composition and Rhetoric at Miami University. His teaching and research interests include digital rhetorics, game studies, and spatial rhetorics.
Diane Jakacki is the Digital Scholarship Coordinator at Bucknell University. Her research specialties include early modern theatre, popular culture, and digital humanities. Prior to joining Bucknell, Diane was a Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow at the Georgia Institute of Technology where she developed systems and initiatives designed to assist students in integrating technology into learning environments. She is an assistant director of the Digital Humanities Summer Institute and a member of the digital advisory committees for the Records of Early English Drama, the Map of Early Modern London Project, and Iter Gateway to the Middle Ages & Renaissance.
Aimée Knight is an assistant professor of Communication and Digital Media at Saint Josephs University. Her research focuses on digital design practices—from web sites, to social media, to classrooms. She is founder and director of the Beautiful Social Research Collaborative where students perform the public work of digital composition and literacy instruction to co-create web and social media strategies with nonprofit and community-based organizations.
Caitlin Martin is a lecturer at Indiana State University. She earned her master’s degree in Composition and Rhetoric at Miami University. Her research interests include composition pedagogy, writing transfer theory, research methods, and assessment. Her thesis project used both qualitative and quantitative person-based research to theorize ways to better integrate reflective writing into the composition classroom in order to foster student transfer.
Heidi McKee is an associate professor and the Director of Professional Writing at Miami University. She is also Interim Director of the Howe Writing Initiative in the Farmer School of Business and an affiliate faculty member in Armstrong Interactive Media Studies. She is the founding coordinator of Miami’s Digital Writing Collaborative. With James Porter, she co-authored The Ethics of Internet Research: A Rhetorical, Case-Based Process (2009, Peter Lang). With Dànielle Nicole DeVoss, she co-edited Digital Writing Research: Technologies, Methodologies, and Ethical Issues (2007, Hampton Press; winner of the Computers and Composition Distinguished Book Award for best book in the field in 2007). With DeVoss and Dickie Selfe, she co-edited Technological Ecologies and Sustainability (2009, Computers and Composition Digital Press). And with DeVoss she edited Digital Writing Assessment and Evaluation (2013, Computers and Composition Digital Press).
Susan Miller-Cochran is a professor of English and Director of First-Year Writing at NC State University. Her research focuses on technology, ESL writing, and writing program administration. She is co-author of The Wadsworth Guide to Research (2014, Cengage) and Keys for Writers (2014, Cengage), and she is also co-editor of Rhetorically Rethinking Usability (2009, Hampton Press) and Strategies for Teaching First-Year Composition (2002, NCTE). She currently serves as Vice President of the Council of Writing Program Administrators.
Jason Palmeri is an associate professor of English and affiliate faculty in Interactive Media Studies at Miami University, where he also serves as the Director of the Composition Program. Palmeri is author of Remixing Composition: A History of Multimodal Writing Pedagogy (2012, Southern Illinois University Press) as well as numerous articles on digital pedagogy in journals such as Computers and Composition and Technical Communication Quarterly.
James Porter is a professor in the Armstrong Institute for Interactive Media Studies and in the Department of English at Miami University, specializing in rhetoric history and theory (particularly digital rhetoric), technical and business communication, ethics and methodology for Internet research, and the rhetoric and ethics of interaction. Porter’s co-authored online textbook (Professional Writing Online, 2001, Longman) was one of the first fully online professional communication textbooks. He is the winner of the 2010 Ellen Nold Award for best article in the journal Computers and Composition for his article “Recovering Delivery for Digital Rhetoric.” Currently he is conducting research on the design of online writing/communication courses, serving on the University’s eLearning Advisory Council, and pondering whether writing can be taught responsibly and effectively in a MOOC.
James P. Purdy is an associate professor of English and the Director of the University Writing Center at Duquesne University. His research and teaching interests include digital writing and research practices, new media technologies, and composition and design theory. With Randall McClure, he edited two collections: The New Digital Scholar: Exploring and Enriching the Research and Writing Practices of NextGen Students (2013, Information Today, Inc.), which was awarded the Silver Medal in the Education Commentary/Theory Category at the 2014 Independent Publisher Book Awards, and The Next Digital Scholar: A Fresh Approach to the Common Core State Standards in Research and Writing (2014, Information Today, Inc.). He has published in College Composition and Communication; Computers and Composition; the Journal of Literacy and Technology; Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy; Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture; and Profession; as well as in several edited collections. With co-author Joyce R. Walker, he won the 2011 Ellen Nold Award for the Best Article in Computers and Composition Studies and the 2008 Kairos Best Webtext Award.
Chris Ritter is an assistant professor of English at Clayton State University. He is a former Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow at Georgia Institute of Technology. His research interests orbit around the persuasive and educational capabilities of digital work. He has taught first-year composition, technical communication, professional editing, American literature, multimedia authoring, and digital game studies.
Todd Ruecker is an assistant professor at the University of New Mexico. His research focuses on exploring the increasing linguistic and cultural diversity of educational institutions and developing innovative ways to support student success, especially in the context of high school–college transitions. His work has appeared in a variety of journals such as College Composition and Communication, Composition Studies, Computers and Composition, and WPA: Writing Program Administration. He recently published Transiciones: Pathways of Latinas and Latinos Writing in High School and College (2015, Utah State University Press). His latest project focuses on exploring literacy instruction in rural and small towns in New Mexico.
Marisa Sandoval is a PhD student in Rhetoric, Composition, and the Teaching of English at the University of Arizona. Her current research focuses on composition pedagogy and literacy studies with emphases on writing center administration, writing across communities, and technical communication. Sandoval teaches composition, directs a writing center for student-athletes, and works with the Southern Arizona Writing Project.
Richard (Dickie) Selfe, after 25 years of work in digital literacy and literacy acquisition, was hired as Director of the Center for the Study and Teaching of Writing (CSTW) in the College of Arts and Sciences at the Ohio State University. He also coordinates OSU's Writing Center and works with the coordinator of the Writing Across the Curriculum and Writing Associates programs. Selfe's scholarly interests cluster around the intersections of communication pedagogies, programmatic curricula, and the social/institutional influences of digital systems. He published Sustainable Communication Practices: Creating a Culture of Support for Technology-rich Education (2004, Hampton Press) and co-edited Technological Ecologies and Sustainability (2009, Computers and Composition Digital Press).
David M. Sheridan is an associate professor in Michigan State University's Residential College in the Arts and Humanities, where he directs the Language and Media Center. Sheridan’s recent publications include The Available Means of Persuasion: Mapping a Theory and Pedagogy of Multimodal Public Rhetoric (with Jim Ridolfo and Anthony J. Michel; 2012, Parlor Press), as well as articles in Enculturation and Computers and Composition. He also co-edited Multiliteracy Centers: Writing Center Work, New Media, and Multimodal Rhetoric (with James A. Inman; 2010, Hampton Press).
Nirmal Trivedi is the Director of Academic Transition Programs at Georgia Institute of Technology, which includes the First-Year Seminar and Project One. He works on academic transition concerns affecting first-year students, faculty development, and program coordination across various university units. His research concerns American Studies (19th-century American Literature and Culture) and digital pedagogy. He is a former Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow and a former assistant director of the Communication Center (CommLab) where he tutored undergraduate and graduate students about their multimodal projects.
Douglas M. Walls is an Assistant Professor of English at North Carolina State University where he teaches in the Masters of Science in Technical Communication program. His research interest is in digital rhetoric, especially in social networks and the user experiences of traditionally marginalized groups. His work has appeared in both traditional and new media forms in Computers and Composition; Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy; and the Journal of Business and Technical Communication.
Christopher Weedman is a visiting assistant professor in the Department of English at Kutztown University of Pennsylvania. He is a former Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he served as assistant director of the Communication Center. His scholarship on the films of Joseph Losey, Jean-Luc Godard, Roman Polanski, Jerzy Skolimowski, Howard Hawks, and Anthony Mann has appeared in Quarterly Review of Film and Video and Senses of Cinema. His research interests include American, British, and European film history, post-1945 British literature and drama, and multimodal composition.
Leslie Wolcott is an instructor at the University of Central Florida. Wolcott is interested in the ways that writing can effect change in the world. In addition to teaching writing, she has worked as a community organizer, a nonprofit administrator, and a journalist. At UCF, Wolcott teaches introductory writing classes as well as courses on rhetoric and civic engagement, writing for social change, and writing about science and technology. Her classes emphasize mapping issues of transit and transportation, on and around the UCF campus.
Christopher Scott Wyatt is a visiting assistant professor of business communications at Carnegie Mellon University. His research interests include the rhetoric of special needs and accommodation, with attention to public policy and economics. Wyatt serves on the board of directors of the Autism Connection of Pennsylvania and has worked with the Pennsylvania Department of Labor and Industry to address employment challenges for those with special needs. With Andrew Gordon at the University of Southern California, Wyatt is studying autism and self-identity in virtual spaces following the publication of the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5). Wyatt is also a produced playwright, with shows A New Death, The Gospel Singer, and Women Say Fuck, Too! performed in 2014 at regional theaters.
