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.
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.
Eduardo Mabilog, DMAC Instructional Technology Consultant, is a PhD student at the Ohio State University where his work looks at the intersections writing center studies, composition studies, and anti-racism. He has previously held roles working in writing centers, as a graduate writing program administrator, and now as a graduate coordinator with the writing across the curriculum team at OSU. His developing dissertation focuses on the experiences and labor of writing center directors of color.
DMAC 2024 Presenters
Laura L. Allen, PhD is a committed teacher, community writing consultant, 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 Black kinship rhetorics in online and offline spaces. Laura is also interested in artificial intelligence and bias in the classroom and in communities.
Erin Kathleen Bahl is Associate Professor of Applied and Professional Writing, as well as the Kennesaw State University English Department's inaugural Social Media and Branding Coordinator. Her work explores the possibilities digital technologies afford for creating knowledge and telling stories, with a focus especially on webtexts, webcomics, folklore, accessibility, and digital publishing. She is managing editor for Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy. Her publications include scholarly and creative work in Kairos; Computers and Composition Online; enculturation: a journal of writing, rhetoric, and culture; The Digital Review; Graphic RHM; and The Smithsonian's Folklife Magazine. 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.
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.
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).
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 Gavin P. Johnson specializes in multimodal writing, queer-feminist rhetorics, and critical digital pedagogy. He currently works as the Director of Writing and an Assistant Professor of English at Texas A&M University-Commerce. He is a founding advisory board member of the Digital Rhetoric Privacy Collective (drpcollective.com), which was awarded a prestigious CCCC Emergent Researcher Award for its work bridging academic and public conversations about digital privacy and surveillance. His current book project “follows around” the intellectual histories and embodiminded practices of accountability alongside current technologies of academic surveillance in hopes to compose a queer-feminist praxis of refusal. His writing is published in journals including RSQ, Computers and Composition, Technical Communication, CDQ, College English, Peitho, Composition Studies, Pre/Text, and Literacy in Composition Studies, and various edited collections. For his research, he has been awarded the 2021 CCCC Lavender Rhetorics Dissertation Award for Excellence in Queer Scholarship, an Honorable Mention for the 2020 Computers and Composition Hugh Burns Best Dissertation Award, and the 2016 CCCC Gloria Anzaldúa Rhetorician Award. Dr. Johnson earned his PhD from The Ohio State University in 2020, and he is a proud first-generation college graduate from southeast Louisiana.
Luke Van Niel is a Ph.D. student in English at The Ohio State University, specializing in Digital Media Studies and Disability Studies. Luke is interested in the accessibility of both everyday and advanced technologies and is passionate about embedding access into technological design. His research investigates the lived experiences of disabled people when interacting with technologies and how barriers to accessing technology affect society broadly. He also enjoys visual design, multimodal composition, and exploring emergent technologies such as artificial intelligence.
Calvin Olsen is a senior lecturer in the Department of English at Ohio State and was recently named an Early Career Research & Creative Fellow by the Electronic Literature Organization. His research examines the interstices between monster theory, electronic literature, and media studies; and his current work is an attempt to tackle the creation of argument and notions of the literary using 3D printed objects.
A daily journaler, yogi, and meditator as well as a Mayo Clinic-certified Wellness Coach, 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.