Teaching
I'm a member of the English faculty at the University of Minnesota at Morris; I teach courses in writing, composition studies, creative nonfiction, the novel, narrative theory, and gender studies. (For information about specific classes, see the links in the sidebar.) I also direct the Writing Room and coordinate the College Writing program.
In 2011, I was awarded an Educational Development Program grant to create a new research seminar on multimedia literacies. I also hope at some point to develop a class on LGBTQ literature and an advanced writing class focusing on participatory culture (blogs and social networking software, YouTube, video games, fandom and fan activities). I don't know when I'll be able to offer these classes, but I'm having fun thinking about them!
Research
In graduate school, I specialized in the history of the novel. (I am a total geek about novels. I have been known to scribble impromptu flowcharts of the history of the novel for the edification of innocent bystanders. No, seriously, flowcharts. With lines and arrows and everything. The PhD was probably inevitable.) I chose composition and rhetoric as my minor field because I find the study of people's writing processes and strategies to be endlessly interesting. My graduate research was a mash-up of these interests: I examined what happens when we treat novels as rhetorical transactions between authors and readers. This combination of interests is also the driving force behind the research seminar on Rhetoric & Narration that I've offered several times at UMM.
More recently, I've started taking the narratological and rhetorical approaches practiced in my prior work and applying them to vids. This new work is part of the emerging interdisciplinary field of fan studies, but it maintains strong ties to narrative theory, rhetorical criticism, and several subsets of composition studies, including multimedia literacies. I've written short informal pieces about vids for the In Media Res Media Commons Project and longer academic articles for the journals Film and Film Culture and Transformative Works and Cultures and for the anthology Metalepsis in Popular Culture. Since April 2009, I've presented on vids at a wide range of conferences, including the American University Washington College of Law symposium on Intellectual Property and Gender, the Reception Study Society, Feminisms & Rhetorics, Digital Media and Learning, Narrative, Computers and Writing, the Rhetoric Society of America, and the Conference on College Composition and Communication. If you're curious about what I'm working on, check out my research journal, where I brainstorm ideas, solicit feedback, and occasionally post snippets of works in process.
My work on vids has taken me not only to conventional academic venues but to some places that English professors don't usually go: in May 2009, I joined two other members of the Organization for Transformative Works to testify at the Library of Congress U.S. Copyright Office's triennial consideration of proposals for exemptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). We spoke in favor of an exemption proposal for remix video artists circumventing access control technologies for the purpose of extracting clips for inclusion in noncommercial videos that do not infringe copyright—that is, videos that adhere to the principles of fair use, a doctrine not yet tested in court on remix video. It was pretty cool, aside from the part where I felt obligated to wear a suit and grown-up shoes. And hey, we got the exemption! We'll be defending it again in 2012.
last updated: Saturday, 21-Jan-2012 15:34:58 CST
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