Programs and Areas

Rhetoric, Composition and Literacy

2007 RCL Job Placements

Amy Mecklenberg-Faenger

Position

Assistant Professor of English, College of Charleston, Charleston, South Carolina

Dissertation

"Scissors, Paste, and Social Change: The Rhetoric of Scrapbooks of Women’s Organizations, 1875-1930."

The dissertation examines scrapbooks kept by women’s clubs and reform organizations in the Progressive Era as significant "everyday" rhetorical practices women appropriated, developed, and used as tools of rhetorical education. Amy argues that scrapbooks represent a form of vernacular history that used key rhetorical strategies of appropriation, recontextualization, juxtaposition, and collage. In spite of nineteenth-century pronouncements of the worthlessness of scrapbooks as "literary trifles," and the general exclusion of women from rhetorical theory and practice by nineteenth-century rhetorical theorists, the women in clubs and organizations understood scrapbooking to be a significant and valuable rhetorical practice designed to encourage various reform efforts and preserve a history of those efforts within a larger narrative of American citizenship and progress.

Why Amy Chose University of Charleston

The department was wonderful – people were very friendly and seemed to have productive relationships with one another.
A number of their faculty have interest in nineteenth century studies, which means her work on nineteenth and early twentieth century women fits in well with other research being done in the department.
They take the teaching of composition very seriously as a department – all English faculty teach composition and people were very interested in talking about their writing courses.
She also will get to do some teaching in their graduate program.
There are some exciting opportunities that are developing at the college – they’re currently working on redesigning their composition requirements and trying to get a WAC program off the ground. She will be able to participate in a college-wide conversation about the role writing can play in various disciplines.
Charleston is a historic city and provides ample opportunities to continue doing archival research on women’s rhetorical practices in the Progressive Era

Courses

English 101 Composition (2 sections)
English 305 Advanced Composition (1 section)

Jason Palmeri

Position

Assistant Professor of English, Miami University (Oxford, OH)

Dissertation

Jason’s dissertation, directed by Professor Cynthia Selfe, is entitled "Multimodal Composing: Self, Mind, And Society." Challenging composition's tendency to focus exclusively on alphabetic literacy, numerous scholars have called for a turn to teaching students to produce texts that explicitly blend words, images, and sounds (Kress; Selfe; Wysocki; Yancey; Johnson-Eilola; Lunsford). In calling for this multimodal turn, compositionists have argued that multimodal texts are becoming increasingly central in workplace and civic realms and that students are increasingly arriving in our classrooms with strong visual / multimodal literacies. In making these persuasive arguments for the need to move beyond alphabetic literacy in composition, scholars have understandably emphasized composition's historical lack of engagement with visual and multimodal textual production. He contends, however, that if we look closely at key composition theories from the 1960s, 1970, and 1980s, we can discover a long tradition of studying and teaching writing as a profoundly multimodal act of composing. In particular, his dissertation demonstrates how composition theories of self (expressivism), mind (cognitivism), and society (classical and social-epistemic rhetoric) can contribute to the development of digital multimodal composition studies.

Why Jason Chose Miami

He loved the fact that Miami is primarily focused on undergraduate education, but they also have a strong PhD program in Rhetoric and Composition. For him, this combination offered the best of both worlds. He met many wonderful colleagues and graduate students on his visit, and is excited to be able to contribute to the numerous digital initiatives already in progress at Miami.

Courses

In his first year, he'll be teaching a graduate seminar in research methods as well as range of composition courses in laptop and hardwired computer classrooms. In the future, he plans to teach (and in a few cases, develop) additional undergraduate and graduate courses in composition, digital media studies, disability studies, and technical communication.

Nancy Pine

Position

Assistant Professor of English at Mount Union College in Alliance, Ohio.

Dissertation

Nancy’s dissertation "Authorizing Community Outreach: An Ethnography of a Service-Learning Basic Writing Class" provides a much-needed context for examining the challenges and possibilities of service-learning pedagogy for composition studies by presenting a detailed portrait of the ways in which citizenship and social action, among other issues, are constructed and negotiated by students, the instructor, and community members of a particular service-learning basic writing class and how these issues are represented rhetorically. Her arguments are based on the ethnographic research she conducted of a service-learning composition course in which basic writers tutor first-graders in reading and writing at a local inner-city elementary school as part of their classroom investigation of literacy and education. After studying both the community and university sites of this class, she contends that particular attention needs to be paid to students’ and community members’ negotiation of various roles and authority within such partnerships, particularly as such service-learning programs become institutionalized in composition programs.

Why Nancy Chose Mount Union College

Nancy chose MUC, a comprehensive liberal arts institution, for the opportunity to work most closely with undergraduates in a faculty-driven, teaching-centered community. Specifically, she looks forward to assisting with the continued development of the English department's new undergraduate writing major and minor. She is excited to draw on both her academic and professional writing and editing experience to design and teach her dream courses for the "writing" English students, in addition to work with the Office of Service-Learning to create community-college partnerships. Not to mention, the students, faculty, and administration at Mount are good folks!

Courses

First-year composition, business and technical writing, seminar in professional writing

Subhasree Chakravarty

Position

Three year post-doctoral fellowship at Stanford University.

Dissertation

Subhasree completed her dissertation "Long-distance Nationalism: Persuasive Invocations of Militant Hinduism in North America" in 2006, under the direction of Associate Professor Wendy Hesford.