Rhetoric & Writing Student and Faculty Summer Plans

Dr. Neil Baird, Director: University Writing Program

With Bradley Dilger, Neil will be presenting a poster titled “Uncovering Tacit Knowledge: Digital Tools and the Discourse-Based Interview” at the Computers and Writing conference in June. He will also be riding his bike from Bowling Green to East Lansing in the 10th annual Ride to Computers and Writing “pledge ride” to raise money for graduate students and non-tenure track faculty travel grants. In July, Neil will participate in the Elon Research Seminar on “Writing Beyond the University.” The goal for the first summer is to meet all of the participants as a cohort, form research teams, and design research questions and methods for a mixed methods study the group will conduct the following year.

Brandie Bohney

Brandie will be installed as an executive board member of the graduate strand of English Language Arts Teacher Educators (ELATE) at the ELATE Summer Conference in Fayetteville, Arkansas. During the late-July conference, she will also be presenting as part of two sessions: the first is entitled “‘Teaching the Pre-Service Teachers Where We Left Off’: Reflecting and Interrogating the Transition from ELA Teacher to Teacher Educator” wherein she will be leading a roundtable about entering teacher education through a rhetoric and writing program rather than a traditional English education or education program. The second is a panel presentation, “Advocating for Language Diversity, Equity, and Anti-Racist Approaches,” in which she will be discussing ways to prepare pre-service English teachers to approach language difference in their class through grammar and writing instruction.

Dr. Dan Bommarito, Director: Rhetoric & Writing Program

This summer, Dan is preparing a book proposal about collaborative research writing and plans to attend an intensive workshop on activity theory and practice at University West in Trollhattan, Sweden.

Travis Hein

This summer, Travis will be presenting alongside Emma Guthrie and Morgan McDougall at the Computers and Writing Conference. Travis’s part of the collaborative presentation is about the use of virtual reality in the classroom. In addition, he will serve as a placement reader for the University Writing Program and will complete an independent study with Dr. Baird.

Kristin LaFollette

Kristin graduated with her PhD in Rhetoric and Writing on May 17. She will be moving to Evansville, IN, this summer and will begin her position as Assistant Professor of English at the University of Southern Indiana in August.

Morgan McDougall

Morgan will be presenting at the Computers and Writing Conference in East Lansing, MI. She will also be participating in an independent study and researching student dispositions in writing, which will contribute to the development of her dissertation research.

Bailey Poland

Bailey will attend the feminist sci-fi and fantasy conference WisCon in Madison, WI, from May 24-27 and present her archival research project, “How to Rediscover Women’s Writing: The Rhetorical Performances of Joanna Russ.” She will visit College Park, MD, on June 6-8 to attend a Rhetoric Society of America Summer Institute on “Revealing the Ductwork of Rhetorical Historiography.” Bailey will be taking her preliminary exams, working on her capstone project for the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Certificate, and will continue working on English Department Digital Development and Promotional Outreach.

Brian Urias

Brian will visit Baltimore from July 25-28 to present at the annual conference of the Council of Writing Program Administrators on “Mentoring in the Liminal Space: Cross-Rank Perspectives” with Lyra Hilliard, Elizabeth Keenan Knauss, Jennifer McSpadden, and Mandy Olejnik. He will spend most of the rest of the summer preparing for preliminary exams.

Ann von Mehren

Ann will be working on several academic papers. She has been invited to contribute a short chapter to Norman Mailer in Context, a volume edited by Dr. Magdalen McKinley (Associate Professor of English, Harper College) for Cambridge University Press. Ann’s chapter will be on Mailer’s Vietnam War books Why Are We in Vietnam? and Armies of the Night. She will also be doing some work on her current project (and, hopefully in some ultimate form, her dissertation) on rhetoric and American diplomacy during the Cold War (1945-1980s), which she started this Spring 2019 in her elective course, ACS/HIST 6175: Cultural Diplomacy.

Dr. Sue Carter Wood, Associate Professor

Sue will visit Baltimore, MD, on June 3-8 to attend a Rhetoric Society of America Summer Institute on “Emerging Lines of Inquiry in the New Generation of Memory Studies Scholarship” and a workshop on “Revealing the Ductwork of Rhetorical Historiography.” While in Baltimore, she will also visit the Medical Archives of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine for archival research on Clelia Duel Mosher, who graduated with her M.D. in 1900.

Lena Ziegler

In addition to taking preliminary exams in July, Lena will be working as a Research Assistant for the English Department, focusing on community engagement. Along with her co-editor, she will begin work on the sixth issue of The Hunger (a literary journal she co-founded two years ago), which will come out in September. If possible, Lena would like to visit the Berlin Heights, OH, Historical Archives to learn more about the Free Lovers society of the mid-nineteenth century so that she can begin research on an archival project. Finally, she is looking forward to some summer publications including an essay in Indiana Review and a few poems in Moonchild Magazine.