Don Bialostosky
Professor of English
412-627-6536
dhb2@pitt.edu
CL 628-D
Don Bialostosky is a Professor in the Composition, Literacy, and Pedagogy group. He received his PhD in English in 1977.
Research and Publications: He is the author of a long list of chapters and articles on the Romantics, with particular attention to Wordsworth and Coleridge, and on Pedagogy, Rhetoric, and Dialogics.
He is the author of two books, Making Tales: The Poetics of Wordsworth's Narrative Experiments (U of Chicago P, 1984) and Wordsworth, Dialogics, and the Practice of Criticism in the Literature, Culture and Theory series of Cambridge UP (1992). He is co-editor of the collection, Rhetorical Traditions and British Romantic Literature (Indiana UP, 1995). He has been a leading figure in thinking through the uses and consequences of the work of Mikhail Bakhtin.
His current projects include a "Bakhtinian account of rhetoric that would reframe the classical accounts of the figures of thought to theorize the representation of the discursive situation in various discourse genres, academic and creative, and to teach students productively to enact these figures." Don has served on the editorial boards of The Bakhtin Newsletter, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, and Philosophy and Rhetoric.
Honors and Awards: He served on the MLA Delegate Assembly, the Board of Directors of the Society for Critical Exchange, the Executive Committees of the Conference on College Composition and Communication and of the Associated Departments of English; he served as President of ADE in 2001. He was head of Penn State's English department from 1996 through 2001. He has taught a variety of graduate and undergraduate courses, and he won the GSO "Outstanding Graduate Teacher" award at Penn State in 1994.
He has also taught at the University of Utah, the University of Washington, at SUNY Stony Brook, and at the University of Toledo, where he was a Distinguished University Professor of English, and at Penn State.