Current PhD Students in Composition
Originally from Seattle, I came to the University of Pittsburgh, and to the field of Composition and Rhetoric, as a Ph.D. student in 2009. Most recently, I earned my M.A. in Community Development from Clark University, where I focused primarily on methodologies and pedagogies of community-based and participatory oral history. Through my longstanding involvement with the international “street paper” movement, I have also worked in the areas of independent social media networks and global homeless advocacy in the U.S., South Africa, Scotland, Norway and Colombia. Drawing upon these experiences, my present interests lie at the point of intersection between narrative, memory, placemaking and social action. I am seeking to develop further work in community literacy, multimodal composition and feminist rhetorics.
I came to graduate study at Pitt from Seattle, where I completed my undergraduate degree, coordinated the Seattle University Writing Center, and designed science toys. I trekked across the country to Pittsburgh in 2007, attracted by Pitt's unique emphasis on literacy, pedagogy, and culture as a part of composition studies. My research explores the intersections between feminist historiography, memory studies, rhetoric, and, especially, pedagogy. I'm interested in how pasts are used methodologically and rhetorically, and what implications this has for the writing classroom.
I am a Ph.D. candidate earning dual certificates in Composition, Literacy, Pedagogy, & Rhetoric and Cultural Studies. I research and teach courses on digital rhetoric; electronic literature; digital multimodal composing; technical and organizational communication; technocultural studies and the study of networks; game studies; and risk communication. Before coming to the University of Pittsburgh in 2005, I spent a decade as a paramedic, instructor, and disaster management consultant for emergency services and public policy agencies across New York State. My dissertation, "On Operational Rhetorics: Technical Communication and the Protocols of Disaster Management," inhabits the intersection between these seemingly disparate fields and examines the rhetorical features and protocological systems of control characteristic of written disaster plans.
After receiving my M.A. in Literature from the University of Vermont, I did a two year visiting lectureship at Western Carolina University in Cullowhee, North Carolina. Some of the courses I’ve taught in addition to First Year Composition include “The Album as Literature,” “Jazz, Identity, and the Cultural Imagination,” and “Literature of Place.” My primary interests are composition, new media, feminist rhetorics, and cultural studies. I started the Ph.D. program at Pitt in 2008 and am currently working on an interdisciplinary project that investigates the intersections between literacy, music, technology, and cognitive science, particularly focusing on the role of listening in rhetoric and composition studies.
Racheal Forlow
I am a second-year PhD student at the University of Pittsburgh, currently working at the intersection of literary theory and composition pedagogy. After receiving a BA in English and Creative Writing from SUNY Binghamton, I taught high school English in New Mexico for several years. These experiences have informed my research interests—broadly, I am engaged by questions aimed to think about the limitations and possibilities poststructuralist methodologies offer in relation to knowledge production at the site of new media and composition. I also co-edit the Criticism section for the department’s online literary magazine, Hot Metal Bridge. l
Michael DuPuis
I joined the program after finishing my undergraduate degree at Santa Clara University where I studied politics and culture, and I am currently a K. Leroy Irvis Fellow. I am now studying issues of academic labor, and "immaterial" (affective, cognitive, service, precarious) labor generally, including the work of graduate student employees and composition teachers. Under this banner, I am also looking at the ways in which affect has made its way into composition classrooms and student writing processes alongside globalization and new media. Potential future projects will consider the relationships between ethnicity and social class, between digital culture and economic democracy, and the pedagogies developing around these issues.
I'm a PhD student, originally from Auckland, New Zealand. I completed my BA and MA at the University of Auckland and came to the University of Pittsburgh in 2006 on a Fulbright scholarship. I work on public sphere theory and post-/nationalism in relation to literacy and higher education. My current work focuses on what is at stake in “transnationalizing” composition studies: in particular, I'm interested in examining how composition scholarship and practice varies and circulates across the national contexts of the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand, and how the teaching of composition might be situated in relation to national and transnational publics.
I began the PhD program in 2008 after completing my BA at Lafayette College in Easton, PA, where I worked for the College Writing Program as a Writing Associate for two years. Pitt's emphasis on integrating composition and literature within a framework of critical and cultural studies appealed to me because of my concern with the relationship between composition and literature. I am currently interested in rhetoric, grammar, and print culture in the long eighteenth century, as well as classification and compilation as writing practices. I am also interested in both historical and current attitudes toward correctness and prescriptivism in grammar and usage.
I came to Pittsburgh after completing my Master’s degree in English with dual emphases in Composition and Creative Writing at Western Washington University. I’m broadly interested in (disciplinary) ways of writing and the kinds of cross-fertilization that might be possible across genres and discourses. I’m particularly interested in first-year composition studies and my current project explores the historical contexts of FYC, focusing especially on the situation of the course as it is imagined and maintained in institutional, political, and public settings outside the field of Rhetoric and Composition. While at Pitt, I’ve taught Seminar in Composition, our first-year course, and Written Professional Communication in the Public and Professional Writing Program. For the 2009-2010 academic year, I am also serving as the Composition Program Assistant.
I became interested in the teaching of writing through my work as a TA and writing center tutor at Pasadena City College in southern California. At Pitt I’ve enjoyed teaching a wide range of classes as well as mentoring new TAs for the department's Committee for the Evaluation and Advancement of Teaching (CEAT). I’m honored to have been named a TA/TF Distinguished Teacher for 2009. As a Lillian B. Lawler Fellow during 2009-10, I continue work on my dissertation, *Stretching the Discipline: Revealing Disruptions in Composition’s Culture of Scholarship*, which explores the contributions of scholarship that, because of its form, location of origin, or participatory scope, is marginalized within the discipline. I argue that such scholarship puts pressure on what we imagine to be possible, valuable, and appropriate work of writing pedagogies. My article “Remapping the Terrain of Knowledge: Telling Stories from the Two-year College,” which takes up the value of peripheral scholarship from the perspective of the two-year college, is forthcoming in *Reader*.
Pamela VanHaitsma
Before coming to Pitt this fall (of 2009), I taught composition at Ohio State University and San Francisco State University, where I did MAs in Women's Studies and English. I've also taught in community settings, including juvenile halls and prisons, domestic violence shelters, and a program for young people who will be the first in their families to graduate from college. I'm interested, then, in the teaching of writing across a range of settings. My research interests are in histories of such instruction, especially in relation to questions of access; feminist and queer historiography; and feminist rhetorical theory. Currently, I'm studying nineteenth-century letter-writing guides (housed in Pitt's Nietz Collection), asking how they function as not only a form of rhetorical education, but also a pedagogy of normal/deviant gender and sexuality.
I am primarily interested in the intersections between Queer Theory and Composition Studies--particularly in queer pedagogies. I teach courses in Composition that take up the subjects of identity, gender, sexuality and the body. My dissertation project focuses on teaching practices and student writing in conversation with these subjects. I had an article on literacy published in the Spring 2007 issue of Feminist Teacher and an article entitled "Becoming the Loon: Female Masculinity and Performative Pedagogies" published in 2009 in Writing on the Edge. I am also a poet and received my MFA here at Pitt in 2002. My poems are floating around in various journals, and I have two small collections of poems: Choke (winner of the 2004 Frank O'Hara Prize in Poetry) and Love Poem to Androgyny (winner of the Main Street Rag Poetry Competition in 2006). I am the Assistant Coordinator of the Young Writers' Institute High School Program through the Western Pennsylvania Writing Project during the summers. I also study Tai Chi and Chi Kung at the Still Mountain Studio here in Pittsburgh and spend a lot of time roaming around Frick Park in Pittsburgh with my greyhound, Joey.
I came to Pitt as a certified teacher after teaching middle school for several years. I’m generally interested in working with both Children’s Literature and Composition together. Particular concerns include how contemporary globality is represented in relation to reading and writing and how questions of reading and affective response inform pedagogy.