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Welcome New RCL Graduate Students!
This year, Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy Studies is welcoming three new M.A. students and six new Ph.D. students to the program. The new graduate students come from across the country and represent a wide range of interests. Keep reading to learn more about them!
Chase Bollig
Chase Bollig is an incoming master's student in Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy. He graduated with a BA from the University of Oklahoma in May 2009. While at OU, he spent three years at the university's writing center, which brought him to the RCL field. His research interests include socioeconomic class and literacy, citizenship and writing, 20th century literature, and counterculture literature. Chase always has difficulty answering the question of what he does for fun and only assumes it must be some combination of books, movies, and wandering about aimlessly.
Annika Konrad
Annika comes from Milwaukee, WI via the University of Wisconsin, Madison where she studied English with an emphasis in Creative Writing. She plans to study rhetoric, composition, and literacy at OSU.
Jennifer Michaels
New Ph.D Students
Elizabeth Brewer
Elizabeth Brewer is a first-year Ph.D. student in Rhetoric, Composition, and Disability Studies, and is starting her seventh year in a row at Ohio State after earning her B.A and M.A. here. Her current research focuses on the rhetoric of mental illness. She is specifically interested in the ethos of individuals diagnosed as mentally ill and the ways in which medical and colloquial language shape our cultural understanding of mental illness. In addition to these interests, she has presented on the role of visual texts and technology in the first year writing classroom, and is the recipient of the 2009 Vera Carter Cooley Award for Excellence in the Teaching of First Year Writing. If Elizabeth has a little free time, she usually spends it sleeping, playing with her cat George, or going for walks around her neighborhood. If she has a lot of free time, she has probably left the country.
Jen Herman
Jen Herman is a first-year Ph.D. student in the RCL program at OSU. Unwilling to relinquish her abiding interests in both biology and language, Jen studies science and medical rhetorics, and is attempting to marry those interests with the study of gender and identity performance. She has recently presented a paper on climate change rhetoric at the 2008 CCCC in San Francisco, and will present on multimodal rhetoric in science museums at Feminist Rhetorics 2009 in East Lansing this October. In her spare time, Jen favors long runs, good food and old movies.
Annie Mendenhall
Cate Sacchi
Erika Strandjord
Erika Strandjord is looking forward to returning to Columbus and OSU after a year off. Having finished her MA at OSU in 2008, Erika joined the English department at Luther College, her alma mater, and while there she not only gained teaching experience but also re-developed her Minnesota accent and was part of a ukulele duo. When in academic-mode, Erika enjoys exploring 19th-century American rhetoric, especially Native American rhetoric, but she also finds contemporary religious rhetoric, pedagogy, and digital media studies fascinating. She looks forward to attempting to form a coherent body of work out of these various interests in the next few years. Outside of school, Erika enjoys hiking, baking, knitting, and reading detective fiction.
Julia Voss
