Moriah Kirdy
- Teaching Associate Professor, Associate Director of the Institute for Writing Excellence
Moriah's Affiliations: Writing Institute
Moriah L. Kirdy is the Associate Director of the William S. Dietrich II Institute for Writing Excellence. She holds a PhD in English with a focus in Composition and Rhetoric from the University of Pittsburgh and an MFA in Poetry from George Mason University.
Kirdy also teaches in the Composition and Public and Professional Writing programs with a focus on genre and interdisciplinary writing. Projects in her courses aim to engage students' backgrounds, identities, disciplinary interests, and career aspirations so that students experience how the work of each course can be applied to their own lives and endeavors.
Her research focuses on notebook-based information system genres (such as the commonplace book, bullet journal, and health management systems). This work explores how constrained (rule-based) writing mechanics remediate personal information into forms more pleasurable to grapple with, mitigate negative affects, and defer and distribute personal responsibility and agency to the rhetorical potential of the writing systems themselves.
Her areas of expertise involve rhetorical genre theory, the material culture of writing, exploratory analog and digital methods of reading and writing, affect theory, and everyday writing.