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Kelly Bradbury Wins Awards and Scholarships for Research on Intellectualism
Ideas for scholarly work can come from a number of places. For Kelly Bradbury, her interest in intellectualism and anti-intellectualism had already led to a Masters thesis on attitudes towards learning in the college classroom. When thinking about topics for her Ph.D. dissertation, Bradbury sought out advice from her advisor and found inspiration from her work as an Outreach Consultant in the Center for the Study and Teaching of Writing (CSTW). The resulting topic was compelling enough to convince two separate committees to award her both the CSTW Dissertation Award and an Alumni Graduate Grants for Research and Scholarship Award.
Bradbury will use the funds from her awards to travel to a Detroit, Michigan archive to study This research will comprise one of the three chapters of her dissertation, which will explore how access to reading and writing affected and continues to affect attitudes toward intellectualism in lyceums in the 19th century, labor colleges in the 20th century, and adult education classes in the 21st. Labor colleges, in existence through the 1920s and 1930s, educated working class adults about current labor practices, while lyceums were traveling lecture circuits intended to "diffuse knowledge" to those who wanted it.
Her advisor had a major impact on her choice of topics. "Literacy wasn't on my radar originally. When I came to Ohio State, Dr. Harvey J. Graff was a new hire, a big deal for Ohio State's Rhetoric and Composition program. I took a class with him my first year and we read articles that dealt with literacy, and race, class and gender in the 19th and 20th century," said Bradbury.
"It then started to click that all the work I had done for my Masters thesis on anti-intellectualism—in all of that work, I had never considered people's access to reading or writing as a factor. I thought, 'of course, if they're not letting women, for example, read and talk about books, that might influence their desire to learn.' What is the relationship between people's attitudes to reading and writing and their access to them?"
Bradbury teaches GED writing classes to adult learners as a CSTW outreach consultant, a position which provided her with the connecting thread between her three chapters. "How I decided on adult voluntary public education as my consistency between those sites was because of my work as an Outreach Consultant with that population. There is an honest tie between my work [in the CSTW] and my dissertation.
