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Meet Professor Hugh Burns
Hugh Burns works with a student group in Scott DeWitt's English 569: Digital Media and English Studies, from left to right Stuart Inamura, Sara Winter, Ladaea Melton, Hugh Burns, Cori Reed
The Department of English and RCL welcomes Professor Hugh Burns, the seventh Visiting Scholar in Digital Media and Composition. On the faculty of Texas Woman's University, Professor Burns has come to undertake a quarter-long project entitled "Rhetorical Leadership, Digital Media, & Global Learning: A Renewed Research Agenda." Two important questions drive this project: How are global discourses shaped by new technology? How do these new media-rich discourses influence the way we learn, teach, and lead in the 21st century? As Burns note, "Rhetoric is flying at the speed of light, so should we. We owe it our students and to our profession."
Burns plans to explore these questions while on professional development leave here at OSU. As a scholar of rhetoric and technology, Burn's specializes in rhetorical invention-the creative canon that defines, explains, and predicts how one recovers what one knows and, more importantly, what one does not know. He is, in fact, the very first scholar in the country to publish a dissertation in the area of computers and writing. That dissertation, Stimulating Rhetorical Invention in English Composition through Computer-Assisted Instruction, was finished in 1979.
As Professor of English and Rhetoric at TWU, Burns teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in history of rhetoric, bibliography and research methods, presidential rhetoric, professional writing, literary nonfiction, and educational technology. He arrived at Texas Woman's University in 1998 and served as Chair of the Department of English, Speech, and Foreign Languages through 2004..
Professor Burns is a retired Lieutenant Colonel of the United States Air Force, serving from 1969 to 1989. Major assignments included Associate Professor of English at the Air Force Academy and Chief of Intelligent Systems at the Human Systems Center. He has been awarded the Air Force's Donald B. Haines Award for "developing intelligent computer-based policy analysis tools." From 1987 to 1993, he taught graduate courses in software design in the humanities and in education at The University of Texas at Austin.
Since 1990, the Hugh Burns Dissertation has been given annually to the best dissertation in the field of computers and composition, and our own Professor Susan Delagrange won that award in 2006. Burns is also a co-founder of The Daedalus Group, serving as Chairman of the Board from 1988 through 2002. From 1993 to 1998, he was the Director of Educational Technology at Smith College, and he has designed and delivered some of the first distance learning humanities courses via the World Wide Web. In 2002, he served as a Fulbright Senior Specialist in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, designing partnerships and implementing programs for gifted Saudi high school students.
While at OSU, Professor Burns will be designing online courses in digital media and bibliography. Please drop by when you are on the third floor of Denney (Denney 365) and introduce yourself; you'll find a delightful colleague!
