The DMAC (Digital Media and Composition) Summer Institute is proud to announce their 2023 faculty presenters.

DMAC is an annual week-long summer institute for faculty and staff, put on by the English department and Digital Media Project, that welcomes participants from across the nation and internationally. Each year, DMAC welcomes faculty presenters doing innovative work in the fields of digital media and composition present workshops. This year the program is set to take place virtually from May 8^th to 15^th.

John Jones serves as the Director with Natalie Kopp serving as the Associate Director this year.  Kopp says, “Professor Jones and I are very excited for this year's institute…This year's DMAC faculty includes faculty from Ohio State in WRL, Digital Media, and creative writing as well as faculty from across the country, many of whom attended DMAC as participants earlier in their own careers.” She also elaborates on the benefits of an online format: “This will be our third year in an entirely online format, which cuts costs for participants and makes it easier for faculty from across the country to present at the institute… [It]also allows us to really showcase the affordances of online teaching technology, so as we grow more into this online space, we get to use some of the same tools we are introducing to participants. Being online also helps us further prioritize accessibility, which is one of the major emphases of DMAC.”

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 student in the Ohio State English department, specializing in community writing, literacy and narrative studies. Having participated in DMAC 2020 and worked as a Graduate Consultant in 2021, she is excited be Co-Associate Director of DMAC this year. Natalie has taught an undergraduate digital media composition course on Digital Storytelling the last two semesters at Ohio State and loves using digital media as mode through which to approach creative and professional writing with her students. Natalie’s own research deals with the development of open access community creative writing programs and the ways community practitioners can draw on critical pedagogies to create more collaborative, empowering  and informed writing spaces.  

DMAC 2023 Faculty

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 and Rhetorics of Advocacy at York University in Toronto, Ontario.

Erin Kathleen Bahl is an assistant professor of English (Applied and Professional Writing) at Kennesaw State University in Atlanta, Georgia, as well as managing editor for Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy. Her work explores the possibilities digital technologies afford for creating knowledge and telling stories, especially through webtexts/webcomics, folklore, and digital publishing. Recent publications include work in Kairos, Computers and Composition Online, The Digital Review, and the Smithsonian's Folklife Magazine.

Michael Blancato is the Director of Undergraduate Writing 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 scholarly work can be found in Computers and Composition, Journal of College Literacy and Learning and Literacy in Composition Studies.

Jonathan Buehl is an 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.

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.

Chad Iwertz Duffy received his PhD in rhetoric, composition, and literacy from The Ohio State University and is assistant professor of English in the Humanities and Teacher Education division and incoming director of the Social Action and Justice Colloquium at Pepperdine University. Dr. Iwertz Duffy's 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 monograph project, The Invention of 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.

Gavin P. Johnson is a teacher-scholar specializing in multimodal writing, queer rhetorics, and community-engaged learning. His research has been recognized with the 2021 NCTE/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 NCTE/CCCC Gloria Anzaldúa Rhetorician Award. His writing is published in journals including Rhetoric Society Quarterly, Computers and Composition, Literacy in Composition Studies and various edited collections. Dr. Johnson is a proud first-generation college graduate from southeast Louisiana, and he currently works as an assistant professor of English and Director of Writing at Texas A&M University-Commerce.

A.E. Osworth is a transgender novelist whose debut, We are Watching Eliza Bright (Grand Central Publishing 2021) was long-listed for The Center For Fiction First Novel Prize, The Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize and The Tournament of Books; it was a finalist for The Oregon Book Award. Their next novel, Awakened, is forthcoming from Grand Central Publishing in March 2025. They are currently a visiting assistant professor at The Ohio State University, where they teach both fiction and nonfiction.

Sherita V. Roundtree is an assistant professor of English at Towson University in Maryland's Baltimore-metropolitan area. Her research lies at the intersections of Composition Studies, Black feminist theories and pedagogies, community literacy, and writing program administration. More specifically, she centralizes the teaching efficacy, pedagogical approaches, and "noise" of Black women teachers of writing as well as the networks of support they utilize. Some of Roundtree's work can be found in Community Literacy Journal, Writers: Craft & Context and other forthcoming edited collections.

Lauren Squires is associate professor in the Department of English at Ohio State, where she teaches courses in English linguistics, language and media, digital media, and language and pop culture. Her research covers a diverse set of interests related to language variation and society, including language standardization, grammatical variation and language processing, and language and media.

Christa Teston, PhD is the Andrea Lunsford Designated Associate Professor in Rhetoric, Composition and Literacy in the Department of English. 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, is forthcoming from Johns Hopkins UP 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 and is Vice Chair of the Rhetoric, Composition and Literacy Program.

The full bios can be found on the DMAC faculty page.