Teaching
I'm a member of the English faculty at the University of Minnesota at Morris; I teach courses in writing, composition studies, creative nonfiction, the novel, narrative theory, and gender studies. (For information about specific classes, see the links in the sidebar.) I also direct the Writing Room and coordinate the College Writing program.
I have recently been awarded an Educational Development Program grant and an Interdisciplinary Studies of Writing grant to create an advanced writing class focusing on participatory culture (blogs and social networking software, YouTube, video games, fandom and fan activities); five utterly fabulous student research assistants are co-designing the class with me. I also hope at some point to develop a class on LGBTQ literature. I don't know when I'll be able to offer these classes, but I'm having fun thinking about them!
Research
In graduate school, I specialized in the history of the novel. (I am a total geek about novels. I have been known to scribble impromptu flowcharts of the history of the novel for the edification of innocent bystanders. No, seriously, flowcharts. With lines and arrows and everything. Upon reflection, the Ph.D. was probably inevitable.) I chose composition and rhetoric as my minor field because, in my not particularly humble opinion, studying people's writing processes and strategies is endlessly interesting. In my graduate research, I managed to mash these interests together by taking a rhetorical approach to fiction: I examined what happens when we treat novels as rhetorical transactions between authors and readers. (This combination of interests is also the driving force behind the Rhetoric & Narration research seminar.)
More recently, I've started taking the narratological and rhetorical approaches practiced in my prior work and applying them to vids. This new work is part of the emerging interdisciplinary field of fan studies, but it maintains strong ties to narrative theory, rhetorical criticism, and several subsets of composition studies, including visual and multimodal literacies. Because I do most of my thinking through writing, I've started working through my ideas over at my LiveJournal. I've written about vids for the In Media Res Media Commons Project and for the journal Film and Film Culture, I've presented on vids at the American University Washington College of Law symposium on Intellectual Property and Gender, and I have more presentations (at conferences on rhetoric and reception studies) coming up this fall.
last updated: Wednesday, 26-Aug-2009 10:36:18 CDT