Current PhD Students in Composition
As a Ph.D. student in rhetoric and composition at the University of Pittsburgh, I study, practice, and teach courses in digital media production and multimodal composing. Before coming to Pitt, I earned my M.A. in Community Development from Clark University where my research focused on pedagogies of participatory oral history and multimedia literacy. I've also been involved with the street paper movement since 2001, working with local street media projects in Europe, Africa, and the Americas and at the headquarters of the International Network of Street Papers in Glasgow, Scotland. I'm currently developing a creative-critical project exploring the aesthetic and ethical potential of voice as a compositional material.
Kerry Banazek
I came to Pitt from the University of Montana, where I earned an MFA in poetry, taught in the composition and undergraduate creative writing programs, and acted as managing web editor for the literary journal Cutbank. Before all that, I worked on ecology field crews in Colorado and Washington State, acted as a professional copywriter and web producer in Seattle, and completed undergraduate degrees in English and mathematics at St. Lawrence University in Northern New York. My academic interests circle around questions related to poetics, invention, place studies, and technology. In particular, my work looks to the practices of digital multimodal composition for inspiration, and it gravitates toward theories of space and place that make room for imagined and technological spaces.
I came to graduate study at Pitt from Seattle, where I completed my undergraduate degree, coordinated the Seattle University Writing Center, and designed science toys. I trekked across the country to Pittsburgh in 2007, attracted by Pitt's unique emphasis on literacy, pedagogy, and culture as a part of composition studies. My research explores the intersections between feminist historiography, memory studies, rhetoric, and, especially, pedagogy. I'm interested in how pasts are used methodologically and rhetorically, and what implications this has for the writing classroom.
I am a Ph.D. candidate earning dual certificates in Composition, Literacy, Pedagogy, & Rhetoric and Cultural Studies. I research and teach courses on digital rhetoric; electronic literature; digital multimodal composing; technical and organizational communication; technocultural studies and the study of networks; game studies; and risk communication. Before coming to the University of Pittsburgh in 2005, I spent a decade as a paramedic, instructor, and disaster management consultant for emergency services and public policy agencies across New York State. My dissertation, "On Operational Rhetorics: Technical Communication and the Protocols of Disaster Management," inhabits the intersection between these seemingly disparate fields and examines the rhetorical features and protocological systems of control characteristic of written disaster plans.
Lauren Campbell
After working in the Writing Center and completing my Bachelor's degree at Western Washington
University, I came to the University of Pittsburgh in
2010 to continue my studies in composition and rhetoric. I like writing; I like reading about writing,
thinking about writing, talking about writing, writing about writing, and (sometimes) I like the actual act
of writing. I'm particularly invested in rhetorical genre theory and exploring the framework it provides
for thinking about how texts work with, for, and on writers, and how writing genres evolve in relation to
the contexts and places of their use, both inside and outside the academy.
I'm also interested in the concept of literacy sponsorship and how it might relate to my interest in the
relationship between writers, genres, and places. Besides all of that, I enjoy admiring the various
dinosaurs that make their homes around Pitt's campus.
Trisha is a flower without a root. Actually, her roots have become digital, and she moves from place to place absorbing the nutrients of philosophy and Rhetoric, so much so they gave her an MA for that one. She is a nomad traveller, suspended momentarily, earning a Phd in Ideas. (This assembly of words does not equal her. )
I came to Pitt in 2008 after completing an MA program at the University of Vermont and a two-year
visiting lectureship at Western Carolina University.
I’m most interested in multimodal composing practices, sound and listening studies, and embodiment.
I’m currently writing a dissertation that attempts to revise and expand conventional notions of listening,
which tend to emphasize the ears while ignoring the rest of the body. In short, I seek to understand how
more fully embodied modes of listening might deepen our knowledge of multimodal engagement and
production. I’m also involved in the HASTAC [Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced
Collaboratory] Scholars Program via Duke University, and DM@P [Digital Media at Pitt].
I'm a PhD student, originally from Auckland, New Zealand. I completed my BA and MA at the University of
Auckland and came to the University of Pittsburgh in 2006 on a Fulbright scholarship. At Pitt, I've taught a number
of different writing courses, worked in the writing center, and served as a mentor for the department's Committee
for the Evaluation and Advancement of Teaching (CEAT). For the 2010–2011 academic year, I was awarded an
Andrew Mellon Predoctoral Fellowship, and in 2011–2012 I'm continuing work on my dissertation as a Lillian B.
Lawler Fellow. I work on public sphere theory and post-/nationalism in relation to literacy and higher education. My
dissertation focuses on what is at stake in “transnationalizing” composition studies: in particular, I'm interested in
examining how composition scholarship and practice varies and circulates across the national contexts of the
United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand, and how the teaching of composition might be
situated in relation to national and transnational publics.
Lauren Hall
I entered the University of Pittsburgh’s doctoral program in Composition in the fall of 2011 after receiving a Masters in English and a Graduate Certificate in Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Louisville. Although my interests are ever-changing, I’m particularly partial to projects centered on feminist historiography, early-twentieth-century health and social movements, and environmental rhetoric. And, as both a student and teacher, I’m invested in the study of contemporary and historical composition classrooms.
lrh35@pitt.edu
Danielle Koupf
I began the PhD program in 2008 after completing my BA at Lafayette College in Easton, PA, where I
worked for the College Writing Program as a Writing Associate for two years. At Pitt I have enjoyed
teaching Seminar in Composition and Written Professional Communication and serving as a mentor for
new TAs with CEAT, the Committee for the Evaluation and Advancement of Teaching. I am broadly
interested in histories of literacy and composition and theories of invention and authorship. My current
project investigates invention, arrangement, and authorship in practices of textual reuse and recycling
ranging from quotation to compilation. Drawing on both historical and contemporary primary materials,
I demonstrate how combining and (re)arranging preexisting texts can be inventive and work at teasing
out the complexities of agency in distributed models of composition.
Peter Moe
Following a BA in Literature from Western Washington University, a brief stint
working in the Washington courts, and an MA in Rhetoric and Composition at Eastern
Washington University, I came to the University of Pittsburgh, attracted not only to its
thriving English department, but also to where it is housed: the Cathedral of Learning, a
42-story marvel of late-Gothic architecture. My current research interests concern the
body as a site of rhetorical practice and how bodies––physical,textual, and other–– inform and shape the first-year composition classroom; I also hold a soft spot for
Quintilian and other classical rhetoricians. My work has appeared in Composition
Forum, Teaching English in the Two-Year College, and Rhetoric Review.
Tara Propper
I studied Writing and Rhetoric at Stony Brook University as an MFA student in poetry. My doctoral work foregrounds theories of space, language and identity, particularly as each are materialized through the production and reception of eco-texts - that is, texts which extend the correspondence between the writer/composer and his/her discursive process to an environmental or spatial Other. My research interests are very much informed by ecocomposition and ecopoetic scholarship, as well as theories of literacy which frame and locate the reader between home, community, academic, imagined, and virtual environs.
I came to Pittsburgh in 2007 by way of various academic pursuits up and down the West Coast, the most
recent of which was completing my Master’s degree in English at Western Washington University,
where I studied Composition, Pedagogy, and Creative Writing. I’m interested in how composition
understands its relationship to public critiques of literacy education. Public conversations about student
writers and the teaching of writing direct policy at all levels; they also play a role in shaping
composition’s research agenda(s) and pedagogical commitments. Given the consequential nature of
public discourse about our work, my research investigates the possibilities for productive engagements
with multiple publics. While at Pitt, I’ve taught Seminar in Composition, as well as courses in the Public
and Professional Writing program. I’ve also had the opportunity to work as a CEAT mentor for new
graduate teaching assistants, and to serve as the Composition Program Assistant.
Justin Sevenker
I began my PhD at Pittsburgh in 2010 after completing an MA in Composition and Rhetoric at the University of Kansas. Over the past six years, I’ve taught college English in a variety of contexts including writing centers, remedial courses, beginning and advanced composition classes, and introductions to communications studies. My experiences in the classroom have made me increasingly interested in composition pedagogy, narratives and representations of teaching (creative, reflective, evaluative), and theories of education. I’m also fascinated by the relations between rhetoric and literature and between genre and social action. My past projects in these veins include an examination of the rhetorical function of U.S. Chicano/a social justice literature as well as a qualitative research study that connects company-mandated speech genres to modes of action in workplace settings.
I became interested in the teaching of writing through my work as a TA and writing center tutor at Pasadena City College in southern California. At Pitt I’ve enjoyed teaching a wide range of classes as well as mentoring new TAs for the department's Committee for the Evaluation and Advancement of Teaching (CEAT). I’m honored to have been named a TA/TF Distinguished Teacher for 2009. As a Lillian B. Lawler Fellow during 2009-10, I continue work on my dissertation, *Stretching the Discipline: Revealing Disruptions in Composition’s Culture of Scholarship*, which explores the contributions of scholarship that, because of its form, location of origin, or participatory scope, is marginalized within the discipline. I argue that such scholarship puts pressure on what we imagine to be possible, valuable, and appropriate work of writing pedagogies. My article “Remapping the Terrain of Knowledge: Telling Stories from the Two-year College,” which takes up the value of peripheral scholarship from the perspective of the two-year college, is forthcoming in *Reader*.
Pamela VanHaitsma
In my current project I’m working out a conception of rhetorical education in service of not only civic engagement, but also what I call “romantic engagement.” Informed by rhetorical genre theory and queer theory, I ask how sites of letter-writing instruction popular in the nineteenth-century U.S. taught rhetorical strategies and genre conventions for composing romantic letters and relations.
Before coming to Pitt in 2009, I taught writing at Ohio State University and San Francisco State University, where I did MAs in Women's Studies and English. I've also taught in community settings, including prisons, domestic violence shelters, and a program for young people who will be the first in their families to graduate from college. My article, “More Talk about ‘Basic Writers’: A Category of Rhetorical Value for Teachers,” was published in the Journal of Basic Writing in 2010.
As a certified middle and high school teacher, I join composition, rhetoric, literary studies, and English education in my research. Having received a 2010 Tobias Fellowship from the English department, I am working on a dissertation that takes up how emotion has been figured (and not figured!) in the event of teaching and reading literary narratives. I’m interested in how emotion is typically linked to descriptions of private reading, as opposed to classroom reading events, and how the current interdisciplinary turn toward emotion speaks to that paradigm of private vs. public. A staunch defender of reading with others in a classroom (and of emotion as placing us within situations, publics), I’m asking how and why we should foreground emotion as teachers of narrative. A major component of my research involves instructional inquiries (designed classroom reading events in a high school classroom), and I approach this research as a reflective practitioner involved in action research. How can emotion, defined as our reading of contacts in the world, refigure how we approach reading narrative with others?