DMAC Staff
John Jones is an associate professor and Director of Digital Media Studies in the Department of English at Ohio State. His primary research areas are digital rhetoric and writing, digital culture, and professional and technical communication. In his research, John has investigated the revision practices of Wikipedia editors, community formation on Twitter, the influence of network structures on writing and persuasion, and the effects of wearable technologies on writing and rhetoric. He is the co-editor, with Lavinia Hirsu, of Rhetorical Machines, a collection that explores the interconnected nature of technology and rhetorical practice. He serves as DMAC Director.
Sabrina Durso is a PhD student in the Ohio State English department, specializing in literary representations of people with disabilities. Outside of literature, Sabrina has a passion for ensuring digital media is accessible and sharing best practices with her colleagues and students. Before starting her work as DMAC Associate Director in 2025, Sabrina was a DMAC participant in 2023. Her research on digital accessibility has won The Ohio State University’s Digital Media Prize for Outstanding Graduate Work in 2023 and 2024.
DMAC 2025 Presenters
Laura L. Allen, PhD is a committed teacher and scholar whose research explores race at the intersections of professional writing, digital media, family literacy, and community literacy. She currently works as Assistant Professor of Writing at York University in Toronto, Ontario. Her current project explores rhetorics of kinship online and offline with an emphasis on Black kinship rhetorics. She teaches professional writing courses on cultural rhetorics, activist rhetorics, writing and AI, and race and culture. Laura earned a PhD in English from the Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy program at The Ohio State University. She earned a BA in English from Spelman College and an MA in Digital Rhetoric and Professional Writing from Michigan State University. When she is not writing, researching or teaching, Laura can be found spending time with family and friends, volunteering, listening to podcasts, and learning to play new instruments.
Erin Kathleen Bahl is Associate Professor of Applied and Professional Writing, as well as the KSU English Department's inaugural Social Media and Branding Coordinator. Her work focuses on creating knowledge, telling stories, and designing for access via digital scholarship, webcomics, folklore, and interactive narrative. Currently Managing Editor for Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy, she will step into the role of Editor beginning in August 2025.Her dissertation, "Refracting Webtexts: Invention and Design in Composing Multimodal Scholarship," won the 2018 Computers and Composition Hugh Burns Dissertation Award. Her collaborative webtext "The Rhetoric of Description: Embodiment, Power, and Playfulness in Representations of the Visual," co-authored with Margaret Price, received the 2023 Kairos Best Webtext Award and was selected for the Best of the Journals in Rhetoric and Composition 2023.
Michael Blancato is the Director of Undergraduate Writing and an Assistant Teaching Professor of English at Roosevelt University. He locates his research and teaching interests broadly in the fields of rhetoric, composition, and literacy. More specifically, his work focuses on labor issues in writing classrooms, digital media composing, and community-engaged pedagogy.
Jonathan Buehl is Associate Professor of English at The Ohio State University, where he teaches courses on rhetoric, research methods, and technical and professional communication. He is the author of Assembling Arguments: Multimodal Rhetoric and Scientific Discourse and the co-editor of Science and the Internet: Communicating Knowledge in a Digital Age and Keywords in Technical and Professional Communication. His essays have appeared in such venues as College Composition and Communication, Technical Communication Quarterly, Landmark Essays on Archival Research, and The Routledge Handbook on Scientific Communication.
Josh Cornelius studied English with a concentration in creative writing at the University of Houston. He graduated with honors after completing a senior thesis project focused on the relationship between the types of texts assigned in first-year writing classes, student perception of those texts and student self-efficacy. He worked as a Writing Consultant at the UH writing center for two and a half years before being promoted to Lead Writing Consultant after graduating. During his time at the writing center, Joshua consulted undergraduate and graduate students on many different genres of writing, presented a roundtable topic at SCWCA and helped develop consultant training materials. He also pursued many fellowships and grants during his time at UH. He was awarded the highest scholarship in literary criticism by the UH English department, was a finalist in a major creative writing competition, won the consultant excellency award, and was admitted into the Mellon Research Scholars program as a fellow. He was also selected as an alternate for the Fulbright US Student Program ETA position in Norway. After his time as a lead consultant, Joshua went on to teach 11th grade US History at a title one high school in Houston. He partnered with the University of Texas - Austin to teach dual enrollment OnRamps classes alongside his normal History classes.
Scott Lloyd DeWitt is Professor of English in the Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy program at The Ohio State University where he conducts writing studies research in digital media, writing analytics, teaching writing at scale, and the study of public communication to imagine new methods for teaching college writing. He is also Director of Writing and Information Literacy in English, Ohio State’s former First-Year Writing program. An OSU Alumni Association Distinguished Teaching Award recipient for his pioneering teaching approaches with technology, DeWitt has served as the director of The Digital Media Project, the English Department's digital media production and teaching studio. Professor DeWitt is the author of Writing Inventions: Identities, Technologies, Pedagogies (SUNY, 2002), which offers instructional stories, histories, and classroom applications and connects the theoretical aspirations of the field with the craft of innovative computer-enhanced composition instruction. Writing Inventions was awarded the “Computers and Composition Distinguished Book Award” in 2003. He is the editor of a scholarly collection of curated exhibits (with H. Louis Ulman and Cynthia Selfe), Stories That Speak To Us: Exhibits from the Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives (Computers and Composition Digital Press, 2013). With colleagues at Ohio State, he was the co-recipient of a Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Grant supporting the development of a general education writing MOOC and the co-developer of WEx, The Writers Exchange, a peer-review platform for student writers. He is the co-founder and former co-director of the Digital Media and Composition Institute (DMAC).
Ashleigh Hardin is the Associate Director of First-Year Writing in the Department of English at Ohio State University where she assists in the development and delivery of the First-Year Writing Program.
Chad Iwertz Duffy is assistant professor of English and director of the social action and justice program at Pepperdine University, where he teaches courses in composition, disability rhetoric, and digital media. His research is located at the intersection of disability studies and digital media composition: design and framing of access/ibility in civic technologies, epistemology of communication access, and digital embodiment and mētis (the rhetorical practice of embodied intelligence and cunning). His forthcoming monograph, Inventing Access: Rhetorical Creation and the Emergent Methodologies of Speech-to-Text Writing, explores how professional speech-to-text writers across the United States and Canada use emergent technologies and dynamic, world-building approaches to rhetorically invent communication access.
Krys Ingman (she/they) is a chronically ill scholar who earned their PhD in the Rhetoric and Writing Program at the Bowling Green State University. Her dissertation research focused on student accessibility and accommodation. Krys works as a critical access advocate within the Critical Design Lab. Projects in the lab feature collaboration with interdisciplinary scholars on a variety of projects pertaining to remote and equitable access for anyone with access needs. The lab advocates for widespread awareness of vocabularies familiar to disabled and neurodivergent communities. Additional areas of research interest include chronic and invisible illness, healthcare inequity, pharmaceuticals, mortality, multilingualism, and popular culture/representation.
Gavin P. Johnson, PhD, is the incoming Director of Composition and Advanced Assistant Professor of Rhetoric and Composition at Texas Christian University (fall 2025). From 2022-2025, he worked as Assistant Professor and Director of Writing at East Texas A&M University. His research sits at the intersections of writing studies, queer rhetorics, critical university studies, and digital surveillance. His writing has been published in peer reviewed journals including Rhetoric Society Quarterly, Composition Studies, Computers and Composition, College English, Communication Design Quarterly, Technical Communication, Literacy in Composition Studies, Pre/Text, as well as important edited collections. With Morgan Banville, he co-edited a special cluster on feminist and queer approaches to rhetorical surveillance studies for the journal Peitho (fall 2024). For his research, he has been recognized with national awards including the 2024 Ellen Nold Outstanding Article Award with Laura L. Allen, the 2021 CCCC Lavender Rhetorics Dissertation Award, and the 2017 Gloria Anzaldúa Rhetorician Award. With the Digital Rhetorical Privacy Collective (DRPC), he has also won the John Lovas Award, Michelle Kendrick Award, and a competitive CCCC Emerging Researcher Grant. He earned his PhD from The Ohio State University in 2020 and is a former Assistant Director of DMAC (2018 & 2019). He is a proud first generation college graduate from southeast Louisiana.
Natalie Kopp is a PhD candidate in the Ohio State English department, specializing in community and multimodal writing, literacy and narrative studies. Before starting her work as DMAC Associate Director in 2022, Natalie was a DMAC participant in 2020 and a Graduate Consultant in 2021. Natalie teaches an undergraduate digital media composition course on Digital Storytelling at Ohio State and loves using digital media as a mode through which to approach creative and professional writing with her students. Natalie’s current research deals with roles of authorship, self, community, and identity in student digital documentary.
Hannah Locher is a PhD student in Writing, Rhetoric, and Literacy at The Ohio State University. Her research engages with feminist rhetorical new materialisms and critical disability studies to investigate how normative constructions of race and ability might shape communication practices and identities of transracial adoptees. Hannah also works with Across the Disciplines to increase equity and professional sustainability for authors and peer reviewers throughout the editorial process.
Luke Van Niel is a Ph.D. student in the Department of English focusing on the intersection of Disability Studies and Digital Media Studies. He is interested in the accessibility of everyday, mundane technologies, as well as the ethical and access-based implications of more “advanced” technologies like artificial intelligence. Luke teaches various courses at the Ohio State University, including Business Writing, Digital Media Composing, and Introduction to Disability Studies. Luke is also Co-Chair of the Council of Graduate Students’ Health, Wellness, and Safety Committee, which is dedicated to increasing accessibility on OSU’s campus and beyond, and he is Vice President of the Graduate Association for Mental Health Action and Advocacy (GAMHAA). Luke loves doing yoga, playing basketball (in real-life and video games), and spending time with his partner and their cat.
A daily journaler, yogi, and meditator as well as a Mayo Clinic-certified Wellness Coach, workshop leader and OSU senior lecturer Jenny Patton brings a wellness focus to her classrooms and to residence-hall workshops. In her seminar course “How to Live a Fulfilling Life,” a class in which students learn from ancient philosophers and modern science, students experiment with practices such as journaling and meditation. She has received the Award for Outstanding Faculty Program for Enhancing Wellness, the English Undergraduate Organization Associated Faculty Member of the Year Award, and the President and Provost’s Award for Distinguished Teaching.
Sherita V. Roundtree, Assistant Professor, studies approaches for developing diverse representation and equitable access for students, teachers, and scholars who write in, instruct in, and theorize about writing classrooms. More specifically, Dr. Roundtree's current work centralizes the teaching efficacy, pedagogical approaches, and "noise" of Black women graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) who teach or have taught first- and/or second-level composition courses. Considering Black women GTAs' feelings of preparedness and approaches to teaching composition, she explores the networks of support they utilize and how they do or do not use resources to navigate pedagogical challenges. In this sense, Dr. Roundtree's research lies at the intersections of Composition Studies, Black feminist theories and pedagogies, community literacy, and writing program administration.
Olivia Rowland is a PhD student in Writing, Rhetoric, and Literacy at The Ohio State University. Her research brings anticapitalist and critical race feminisms to bear on academic labor in writing studies. Olivia's work has appeared in Xchanges, The WAC Journal, and Young Scholars in Writing. She was a DMAC participant in 2024.
At Ohio State University, Christa Teston is a Professor of English in the Writing, Rhetoric, and Literacy Program. Teston mobilizes multiple methods to study how people navigate uncertainty in technoscientific and biomedical contexts. Her first book, Bodies in Flux: Scientific Methods for Negotiating Medical Uncertainty, was published by University of Chicago Press in 2017 and won two national best book awards. Her second book, Doing Dignity: Ethical Praxis and the Politics of Care, was published in 2024 by Johns Hopkins University Press and draws on analyses of three case studies about how in/dignities emerge in contemporary caretaking contexts. Teston also directs Ohio State’s business, professional, and technical writing courses.