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. 

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.

DMAC 2026 Presenters

Erin Kathleen Bahl is Associate Professor of English (Applied and Professional Writing) at Kennesaw State University in Atlanta, Georgia, as well as the department’s inaugural Social Media & Branding Coordinator. Her work focuses on creating knowledge, telling stories, and designing for access via digital scholarship, webcomics, folklore, and interactive narrative. Her digital dissertation on webtexts and invention won the 2018 Hugh Burns Distinguished Dissertation Award. Her 2022 illustrated webtext on audio description (co-authored with Margaret Price) received Kairos’s Best Webtext Award and was selected for the Best of the Journals in Rhetoric and Composition 2023. Along with Chris Andrews, she is co-editor for Kairos. 

Prof. Michael Blancato is the Director of Undergraduate Writing, the General Education Coordinator, and an Assistant Teaching Professor of English at Roosevelt University. His research and teaching focus on rhetoric and composition, with an emphasis on digital media composing and community-engaged writing. Prof. Blancato's work can be found in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Computers and Composition, and Literacy in Composition Studies. 

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.  

Chad Iwertz Duffy is a rhetorician and scholar of digital accessibility, disability studies, and multimodal composing. His work examines access as a rhetorical and ethical practice, with particular attention to speech-to-text writing, image description, and emergent forms of captioning. His books are forthcoming with Utah State University Press and University of Michigan Press. 

 Michelle Gabay is a PhD Candidate at The Ohio State University. Her research interests include writing assessment, literacy studies, disability studies, and writing centers. Her pedagogy is grounded in bridging the teaching of writing as a rhetorical practice in access and equity. 

 Dr. Krys Ingman (she/they) is an accessibility specialist working in the public sector who designs training materials and remediates digital content for Section 508 Compliance. Her work involves crafting materials for leadership development programs, auditing e-learning and learning management system products for accessibility, and recording audio descriptions and synchronizing captions for training videos. Krys previously worked with the Critical Design Lab, a remote multi-disciplinary collaborative team, exploring emerging vocabularies used within disabled, neurodivergent, blind, and/or Deaf/hard-of-hearing communities. She earned her PhD in the Rhetoric and Writing Program at the Bowling Green State University, and her dissertation research focused on student accessibility and accommodation. 

Gavin P. Johnson is a teacher-scholar interested in the intersections of multimodal pedagogy, digital cultural rhetorics, academic surveillance, and queer-feminist praxis. With over 20 publications, Gavin's writing has been featured in top tier venues such as College English, Composition Studies, Computers and Composition, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, Peitho, WPA, and Literacy in Composition Studies as well as important edited collections. His work has been honored with national awards, including the 2026 Lavender Rhetorics Award for Excellence in Queer Scholarship for the cluster conversation "Talking Back Through Rhetorical Surveillance Studies: Feminist and Queer Approaches" co-edited with Morgan C. Banville (Peitho, fall 2024). Gavin is a founding advisory board member of the award winning Digital Rhetorical Privacy Collective (DRPC), which will be publishing an edited collection titled Privacy Setting with the University of Pittsburgh Press. He currently works as an assistant professor of rhetoric and composition and the director of composition at Texas Christian University as well as a managing editor at Composition Forum and section editor of Multimodal-Justice-Action at the Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics. Gavin earned his PhD from Ohio State in 2020, and he is a proud first-generation college graduate from southeast Louisiana.  

Natalie Kopp is an English faculty member at Columbus State Community College. She received her PhD from OSU in 2025 and served as Associate Director of DMAC 2022-2024. Natalie’s dissertation investigated student perceptions of identity, community, and nonfiction ethics in student documentary shorts produced in multimodal-focused writing courses. In her research and teaching, Natalie explores topics related to documentary and narrative ethics, digital ethics, multimodal approaches to composition, and community engagement.  

Hannah Locher is a PhD candidate in Writing, Rhetoric, and Literacy at The Ohio State University. Her research investigates race, identity, and communicative practices of transracial adoptees through the lens of critical feminist new materialisms. Hannah also works with Across the Disciplines to increase equity and professional sustainability for authors and peer reviewers throughout the editorial process and serves on the Writing Innovation Symposium steering committee. Her digital media work appears in Kairos, and she participated in DMAC in 2024.  

A daily journaler, yogi, and meditator as well as a Mayo Clinic-certified Wellness Coach, workshop leader and OSU Engineering Education 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 is an Associate Professor of English at Towson University. Her research lies at the intersections of Composition Studies, Black Feminist Theory, community literacies, and writing program administration. Roundtree's work explores the networks of support Black women educators and students use to sustain themselves and their pedagogies in composition spaces. Some of her work can be found in Community Literacy Journal, Inventing the Discipline: Student Writing in Composition Studies, Writers: Craft & Context, and other publications. 

Olivia Rowland (she/her) is a PhD candidate in Writing, Rhetoric, and Literacy at The Ohio State University, where she teaches writing and serves as a graduate writing program associate. Her research brings intersectional, anticapitalist feminist theory to bear on academic labor and activist rhetorics. Olivia’s work has recently appeared in Peitho, Kairos,  Xchanges, and The WAC Journal. She was a DMAC participant in 2024. 

Jess Vazquez Hernandez is a fifth year graduate candidate in the English department concentrating in Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy. As a first-generation college graduate with intersecting identities, she is interested in exploring sustainability and graduate student mentorship in higher education.