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2018 DMAC Staff
Faculty
Scott Lloyd DeWitt (he/him/his) is an Associate Professor and Director of Digital Media Studies in the Department of English at The Ohio State University, where he also has served as Director of the Digital Media Project and Director of the First-Year Writing Program. An OSU Alumni Association Distinguished Teaching Award recipient, DeWitt directed the Battelle Endowment Institute for New Media and Writing Studies in 2004. With H. Lewis Ulman and Cynthia Selfe, he has edited a collection of exhibits from the Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives called
Stories that Speak to Us. His book
Writing Inventions: Identities, Technologies, Pedagogies (SUNY 2002) won the 2003 Computers and Composition Distinguished Book Award, and he is currently examining a corpus of 5000+ pieces of student writing for a book called
The Optimistic Turn: Authentic Contexts for Peer Review in Composition Instruction. He serves as
Director of DMAC.
Laura L. Allen (she/her/hers) is a PhD candidate in Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy at Ohio State. She is an
Associate Director for DMAC 2018 having previously served as the Social Media Specialist for DMAC 2017 and as a participant in DMAC 2016. Her research is concerned with the intersections of digital rhetoric, race, community literacy, and culturally-sustaining pedagogies. She was recently named a 2018 Digital Pedagogy Lab Fellow where she will be part of the DPL faculty, offering workshops to Lab participants, insights and perspectives on the curriculum, and critical feedback for the organizers.
Gavin P. Johnson (he/him/his) is a PhD candidate in Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy at Ohio State. He is an Associate Director for DMAC 2018 having previously served as a Technology Consultant for DMAC 2017 and as a participant in DMAC 2016. His research investigates the idea of rhetorical invention as queer possibility in digital and pedagogical spaces. He is particularly concerned with cultural rhetorics, critical pedagogies, and queer-feminist approaches to research methodology. Gavin is the winner of the 2017 CCCC Gloria Anzaldúa Rhetorician Award, a national award recognizing scholars whose research “participates in the making of meaning out of sexual and gender minority experiences.” He was recently awarded the 2018 Eric Walborn Award for Excellence in Digital Media and English Studies Instruction by the OSU Department of English.
Jonathan Buehl (he/him/his) is Associate Professor and Vice Chair of Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy in the OSU Department of English. He researches and teaches courses on technical writing, technical editing, scientific writing, and research methods. 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. His essays have appeared in
College Composition and Communication and
Technical Communication Quarterly. He is part of the DMAC
Faculty Team.
John Jones (he/him/his) is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at The Ohio State University. 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, and the influence of network structures on writing and persuasion. He is currently working on a number of projects exploring the effects of computational processes on writing and rhetoric as they relate to wearable devices and digital culture. From 2009–2017 John was a featured contributor to DMLCentral.net where he wrote about education, digital literacy, and writing. He is part of the DMAC Faculty Team.
Susan M. Lang (she/her/hers) is Director of the Center for the Study and Teaching of Writing and Associate Professor at The Ohio State University. Her research interests include big data as it applies to teaching and assessment, writing program administration, technical editing, and social media integration. Publications have appeared in
CCC, JTWC, WPA Journal, Computers and Composition, College English, Technical Communication, and various edited collections. She is part of the DMAC
Faculty Team.
Ben McCorkle (he/him/his) is Associate Professor and teaches courses in composition, rhetoric, literary publishing, and digital media studies primarily on The Ohio State University’s Marion campus. He is the author of the book
Rhetorical Delivery as Technological Discourse: A Cross-Historical Study, as well as several articles in publications including
Computers and Composition Online, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, and
Composition Studies. He also serves as the co-director of the
Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives (DALN). He is part of the DMAC
Faculty Team.
Margaret Price (she/her/hers)is Associate Professor and Director of Disability Studies at OSU. Her research interests within rhetoric and composition include discourse analysis, disability studies, and digital composition. Her book
Mad at School: Rhetorics of Mental Disability and Academic Life was published by University of Michigan Press in 2011. Price also publishes scholarly articles, creative essays, fiction, and poetry in venues including
College Composition and Communication, Profession, Disability Studies Quarterly, Bitch: Feminist Response to Pop Culture, and
Ms. magazine. Recent achievements include being inducted into the Susan M. Daniels Disability Mentoring Hall of Fame in 2017 and, with Christa Teston and John Jones, was awarded a Humanities Without Walls grant to foster collaboration among communities in disability, medicine, and rhetorical studies. She is part of the DMAC
Faculty Team.
Lauren Squires (she/her/hers) is an Associate Professor in the OSU Department of English. A linguist, she conducts research on English language variation, sociolinguistic perception, and language and media. Lauren has published articles in
Language in Society; Journal of Sociolinguistics; Language, Cognition, and Neuroscience; American Speech; Journal of English Linguistics; Journal of Linguistic Anthropology; and
Discourse, Context, & Media. Her book chapters also appear in several edited volumes. She serves on the editorial boards of
Discourse, Context, & Media and the Language and Computers book series (Brill) , and she is the Book Review Editor for
Language. She is part of the DMAC
Faculty Team.
Christa Teston (she/her/hers) is Associate Professor and Director of Business and Technical Writing in the OSU Department of English. She studies material-discursive methods for navigating uncertainty. To do this, she analyzes written, visual, statistical, and other embodied tactics for manufacturing evidence in technoscientific and biomedical domains. Christa also directs the department’s business and technical writing program while teaching undergraduate and graduate courses in rhetorics of science and medicine, rhetoric and community service, and digital media. Her monograph,
Bodies in Flux: Scientific Methods for Negotiating Medical Uncertainty, is available from University of Chicago Press. With Wendy Hesford and Barbara Biesecker, she co-edits the “New Directions in Rhetoric and Materiality” book series at The Ohio State University Press. She is part of the DMAC
Faculty Team.
Amy Spears (she/her/hers) has been the Manager of the Digital Media Project in the Department of English at OSU since 2007. Prior to that she combined her tech skills and her English and film production degree as a web communications specialist and a User Interface specialist for several organizations. She has also served as Vice President of the board of directors of the Women’s Flat Track Derby Association for the past 2 years, and has been involved with growing the sport of roller derby for over a decade. She is the
Manager of OSU’s Digital Media Project (DMP).
Consultants
Nicole M. Pizarro Colón (she/her/hers) is a PhD student in the English Department at The Ohio State University. Her primary focus is in film and adaptation studies. Her interest in digital media and composing comes from a desire to find out ways in which film can be implemented in the ESL classroom. She is also interested in finding ways to bridge adaptation studies and composition. If you’re interested in having a conversation about the latest film adaptation or how amazing her hair is, she’d be more than happy to talk with you. Nicole serves as a
Technology Consultant at DMAC 2018 having previously attended DMAC as a participant.
Sean Kamperman (he/him/his) is a PhD candidate at Ohio State and former administrative assistant for the Digital Media Project. His research explores the intersections of rhetoric, literacy, disability, and digital media, and he’s done projects on mental disability, digital audio, and digital maps. At Ohio State, Sean has taught courses in digital media, disability studies, and first- and second-year composition. In Spring 2017, he received the English Department’s Walborn Award for Excellence in Digital Media & English Studies Instruction. Sean is a
Technology Consultant for DMAC 2018 having previously been involved with DMAC as a lab consultant and participant.
Jacinta Yanders (she/her/hers) is a PhD candidate in the Department of English at OSU. She primarily researches mediated representations as well as contemporary media trends. Jacinta is currently working on her dissertation, which examines the narrative impact and audience reception of television reimaginings in which elements of a character’s identity are changed from the original text. Jacinta has previously presented research on topics such as the intertwining of television and social media, representations of the Black Lives Matter Movement and police brutality on television, and the reconfiguration of the Syfy network as a potential space for progressive representations. More recently, her chapter “Building and Breaking an Antihero: The Rise of Sonny Corinthos” was published in the book
Hero or Villain?: Essays on Dark Protagonists of Television, and her essay “Interactions, Emotions, and Earpers:
Wynonna Earp, the Best Fandom Ever” appears in the March 2018 issue of
Transformative Works and Cultures. Classes Jacinta has taught at OSU include First Year Writing, Introduction to Film, Digital Media Composing, and Documentary in the U.S. Experience. Jacinta serves as a
Social Media Specialist at DMAC 2018 having previously been involved with DMAC as a Technology Consultant and participant.

Rebecca Hudgins (she/her/hers) is a PhD student in Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy at Ohio State. She is Accessibility Coordinator for DMA 2018, having previously attended DMAC as a participant in 2017. Her research interests include rhetoric of health and medicine, accessible pedagogies, and disability studies.
2017 Staff
Scott Lloyd DeWitt is an Associate Professor and Vice Chair of Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy in the Department of English at The Ohio State University, where he also has served as Director of the Digital Media Project and Director of the First-Year Writing Program. An OSU Alumni Association Distinguished Teaching Award recipient, DeWitt directed the Battelle Endowment Institute for New Media and Writing Studies in 2004. With H. Lewis Ulman and Cynthia Selfe, he has edited a collection of exhibits from the Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives called
Stories that Speak to Us. His book
Writing Inventions: Identities, Technologies, Pedagogies (SUNY 2002) won the 2003 Computers and Composition Distinguished Book Award, and he is currently examining a corpus of 5000+ pieces of student writing for a book called
The Optimistic Turn: Authentic Contexts for Peer Review in Composition Instruction. He serves as
Director of DMAC.
Jonathan Buehl (Associate Professor and Director of Business and Technical Writing) researches and teaches courses on technical writing, scientific writing, and research methods. He is the author of
Assembling Arguments: Multimodal Rhetoric and Scientific Discourse (University of South Carolina Press). His essays have appeared in
College Composition and Communicationand
Technical Communication Quarterly. With Alan Gross, he edited
Science and the Internet: Communicating Knowledge in a Digital Age (forthcoming, Baywood Publishing Company, Inc.). He is part of the DMAC
Faculty Team.
Kay Halasek’s areas of scholarly publication include rhetorical theory; composition theory, history, and pedagogy. She’s co-editor of
Landmark Essays on Basic Writing, author of
A Pedagogy of Possibility and co-author of two writing textbooks. Her recent publications focus on eLearning, particularly massive distance education in MOOCs. She currently directs the University Institute for Teaching and Learning. She is part of the DMAC
Faculty Team.
Margaret Price’s research interests within rhetoric and composition include discourse analysis, disability studies, and digital composition. Her book
Mad at School: Rhetorics of Mental Disability and Academic Life was published by University of Michigan Press in 2011. Price also publishes scholarly articles, creative essays, fiction, and poetry in venues including
College Composition and Communication, Profession, Disability Studies Quarterly, Bitch: Feminist Response to Pop Culture, and
Ms. magazine. She is part of the DMAC
Faculty Team.
Lauren Squires conducts research on English language variation, sociolinguistic perception, and language and media. Lauren is particularly interested in how notions of “standard” English are produced and reinforced across communicative contexts, how they manifest in real-time language processing, and what this tells us about the structure of linguistic and social knowledge. She is also interested in mass media discourse and ideologies of language. Lauren has published articles in
Language in Society; Journal of Sociolinguistics; Language, Cognition, and Neuroscience; American Speech; Journal of English Linguistics; Journal of Linguistic Anthropology; and
Discourse, Context, & Media. Her book chapters also appear in several edited volumes. She serves on the editorial boards of
Discourse, Context, & Media and the
Language and Computers book series (Brill), and she is the incoming Review Editor for
Journal of English Linguistics. She is part of the DMAC
Faculty Team.
Christa Teston studies material-discursive methods for navigating uncertainty. To do this, she analyzes written, visual, statistical, and other embodied tactics for manufacturing evidence in technoscientific and biomedical domains. Christa also directs the department’s business and technical writing program while teaching undergraduate and graduate courses in rhetorics of science and medicine, rhetoric and community service, and digital media. Her monograph,
Bodies in Flux: Scientific Methods for Negotiating Medical Uncertainty, is forthcoming from University of Chicago Press. She is part of the DMAC
Faculty Team.
Erin Kathleen Bahl is a doctoral candidate in the English department at the Ohio State University studying digital media, composition, and folklore. Her research investigates the possibilities that new media and digital technologies offer for creating knowledge and telling stories. Her work has been published in
Composition Studies,
Humanities Journal, Harlot of the Arts,
Signs and Media, Showcasing the Best of CIWIC/DMAC, and
Computers and Composition (print and online). She’s excited to return this year as
Associate Director of DMAC.Erin’s comics:
Link to
PowerPoint illustration tutorial
“Lantern” (Nashville Review)
“Citrus and Canaries” (Through the Twisted Woods)
“The Magpie’s Nest” (Computers and Composition Online)
Gavin P. Johnson is a PhD student in Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy at Ohio State. His research investigates the intersections of Composition & Digital Media Pedagogy and Queer Rhetorics & Literacies. He is particularly interested in the idea of rhetorical invention as queer possibility in digital and pedagogical spaces. His research “Grades as a Technology of Surveillance: Normalization, Big Data, and the Teaching of Writing” was recently accepted for publication, and he is the winner of the 2017 CCCC Gloria Anzaldúa Rhetorician Award, which is a national award that recognizes scholars whose research “participates in the making of meaning out of sexual and gender minority experiences.” At DMAC 2017, he is a
Technology and Instruction Consultant and will also give a presentation titled “Pairing College Writing Instruction and Community Engagement: How and Why,” which will focus on teaching community engagement in the Literacy Narratives of Black Columbus course.
Sherita V. Roundtree is a doctoral candidate in the Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy program at The Ohio State University (OSU). She holds degrees in English, Secondary Education from Salisbury University (BA) and in Composition and Rhetoric from the University of Nebraska, Lincoln (MA). She has taught several versions of first-level writing courses, facilitated community workshops, and co-taught a graduate teacher training course. Additionally, Sherita has served as a graduate associate assistant for the Minor in Professional Writing, the First-year Writing Program, and the Digital Media Project (DMP). Sherita’s research lies at the intersections of Composition Studies, Black women’s rhetorics, writing program administration, and service learning initiatives. Specifically, her dissertation focuses on Black women graduate teaching assistants’ (GTAs) teaching efficacy and pedagogical approaches in first- and/or second level composition courses. When she is not dissertating, Sherita spends her time as an organizing member of Digital Black Lit and Composition (DBLAC) expanding and strengthening the organization’s connection to Black graduate students in fields related to English Studies. She is a
Technology and Instruction Consultant for DMAC 2017.
Jacinta Yanders is a PhD candidate in the Department of English. She most often studies contemporary media trends and representations of race, gender, and sexuality in media. Her previous work includes presentations and writings on topics such as the intertwining of television and social media, representations of the Black Lives Matter Movement and police brutality on television, and the reconfiguration of the Syfy network as a potential space for progressive representations. Jacinta is currently working on her dissertation which analyzes the impact on narrative construction and audience reception that occurs when television remakes change elements of characters’ identities. Additionally, Jacinta is deeply invested in pedagogical pursuits, most recently with a particular emphasis on critical pedagogy, digital pedagogy, and what Dr. Kevin Gannon refers to as radical hope. Previous classes taught by Jacinta include Documentary in the U.S. Experience, Digital Media Composing, Introduction to Film, and First Year Composition. She is a
Technology and Instruction Consultant for DMAC 2017.
Michael Blancato is an English PhD candidate at Ohio State. He received a BA in English and a BS in psychology from the University of Florida in 2009. He continued his studies at Temple University, where he received an English MA in 2011. Michael locates his research and teaching interests broadly in the fields of rhetoric, composition, and literacy. More specifically, his work focuses on labor issues in composition classrooms, online writing pedagogy, and service learning pedagogy. He is currently working on a dissertation that uses theoretical models from Hannah Arendt to explore the ways material social practices and conditions enable and constrain possibilities for undergraduate students to see their writing efforts as constructive work and/or public action.His work can be found in
Computers and Composition,
Scholar Electric,
Bright Lights Film Journal, and the
Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives blog. He is a
Studio Consultant for DMAC 2017.
Sam Head wants to live in a world where students’ writing can have real impacts and purposes, where teaching comes with chocolate, and where his daughters’ rhetoric about bedtime doesn’t affect him too much. As a Ph.D. student in Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy at Ohio State University, his research includes how to teach students about audience using social media and how to figure out ways in which students can use their writing skills in engaging and authentic contexts. When he’s not lesson planning, studying social media, or grading papers, he’s most likely playing pretend with his two daughters (their dress-up collection is quite extensive now), singing loudly at church (mostly tenor), or spending quality time with his wife (often in DIY house projects, cooking, or reading young adult literature together). He is a
Studio Consultant for DMAC 2017.
Chad Iwertz is a PhD Candidate in rhetoric, composition, and literacy at the Ohio State University, where he teaches courses in composition, disability studies, and digital media. He also works for the Second Year Writing Program and the Digital Media Project here at Ohio State. Chad’s research focuses on methodologies of transcription and their ties to captioning as rhetorical, social, and cultural practice. His work can be found in
Computers and Composition, Peitho, HĀSTAC, Teaching with Writing, Willamette Valley Voices, and
The Sigma Tau Delta Review. He is a
Studio Consultant for DMAC 2017.
Sean Kamperman is a fourth-year PhD student at Ohio State. His research explores the intersections of rhetoric, digital composition, literacy studies, and disability studies. He’s taught courses in digital media composing, first-year writing, and second-year writing. In Spring 2017, Sean received the English Department’s Walborn Award for Excellence in Digital Media & English Studies Instruction for a project utilizing digital mapping as a critical analysis tool in a disability studies-themed course. He is very interested in how digital writing tools offer composers ways of working around systems of oppression. In particular, his teaching and research seeks to explore and enact broad accessibility as a guiding ethic. He is a
Studio Consultant for DMAC 2017.
Cynthia Lin is a PhD. candidate of the School of the Teaching and Learning and finishing her study this summer (Yeah!). Her dissertation project explores second language students’ learning experiences in three different First-Year Writing courses. She did her Concept 60 on her study last year, and is looking forward to “reviewing, learning and sharing” her takeaways with DMAC people this year. She is a
Studio Consultant for DMAC 2017.
Paula Miller is a PhD candidate in Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy at The Ohio State University. Building on her background as a writing center director, she is interested in understanding how collaborative literacy practices in makerspaces can influence the ways we think about both pedagogical and classroom design in composition studies. She is currently working on several projects on peer review in digital spaces in addition to her makerspace research. In her free time, she likes making stuff and plucking on her ukulele. She is a
Studio Consultant for DMAC 2017.
Brenda Brueggemann recently joined the English Department at the University of Connecticut as Professor and Aetna Endowed Chair of Writing; she is also UConn’s Director of the First-Year Writing Program. She was a Buckeye (yes, right here at THE Ohio State University) for 21 years! Her research focuses on disability and deaf studies in the humanities, particularly in (a) tango with writing studies. Lately she’s been thinking about captioning and art (two distinct representational and interpretive acts) while also pondering the potential for captioning as art (combined). She is a
Presenter at DMAC 2017.
Khirsten L. Echols Khirsten L. Echols is a doctoral candidate at the University of Louisville. She holds degrees in English Language and Literature from Tougaloo College (BA) and Composition, Rhetoric, and English Studies from the University of Alabama (MA). Since 2013, she has taught a range of introductory and advanced courses in Composition, Business and Technical Writing, Literature, and University Orientation. She also has one year of experience as an editor of Cardinal Compositions, U of L’s digital and print student writing publication, and as a Writing Across the Curriculum consultant at Kentucky State University. Khirsten’s research lies at the intersections of cultural rhetorics, namely African American rhetoric, historiography, and digital humanities. Specifically, her work is centered on HBCU communities and the rhetorical affordances of institutional narratives for revisionist presentations of HBCU histories. She is a
Presenter at DMAC 2017.
Jeff Grabill serves Michigan State University as the Associate Provost for Teaching, Learning, and Technology. He is a Professor of Rhetoric and Professional Writing. His research focuses on how digital writing is associated with citizenship and learning, and that work has been located in community contexts, in museums, and in classrooms at both the K-12 and university levels. Grabill is also a co-founder of Drawbridge, an educational technology company. In his role as Associate Provost, Dr. Grabill is responsible for guiding the development of technology-enhanced instruction on campus via his role as Director of the Hub for Innovation in Learning and Technology and his leadership of teaching professional development through the Academic Advancement Network. He is a
Presenter at DMAC 2017.
Zach Harvat is a PhD candidate in English at The Ohio State University. He specializes in 20th/21st c. American literature, queer theory/queer of color critique, LGBTQ literature, and video game studies. His dissertation examines how American queer cultural production—including literature, film, television, video games, and comics—engages with history in the wake of the AIDS epidemic, drawing on theorizations of the ludic from video game studies and postmodernism to help understand how queer subjects interact playfully with history through affective and temporal strategies beyond trauma or melancholia. At Ohio State, he has helped to develop courses in video game studies within the department and he has worked with faculty across departments to create an interdisciplinary undergraduate minor in game studies. He received his MA from The Ohio State University in 2015 and his BA from The University of Tulsa in 2013. He is a
Presenter at DMAC 2017.
John Jones is an Assistant Professor of Professional Writing and Editing at West Virginia University. 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, and the influence of network structures on writing and persuasion. He is currently working on a number of projects exploring the effects of computational processes on writing and rhetoric as they relate to wearable devices and digital culture. Since 2009 John has been a featured contributor to DMLCentral.net where he blogs about education, digital literacy, and writing. He is a
Presenter at DMAC 2017.
Drew Sweet is a PhD student in English at The Ohio State University, where he also received both his B.A. and M.A. in English. He specializes in the study of narrative across periods and media, especially the 19th century novel, film and television, and video games. His work centers on the structures and experiences of narrative and ludic forms of spatial representation. Together with Zachary Harvat, he co-developed a second-level writing course devoted to the analysis of video games, contributed to a proposal for an entry-level English course on game studies, and served on a committee for the formation of an interdisciplinary minor in game studies at Ohio State. He is a
Presenter at DMAC 2017.
Amy Spears has been the Manager of the Digital Media Project in the Department of English at OSU since 2007. Prior to that she combined her tech skills and her English and film production degree as a web communications specialist and a User Interface specialist for several organizations. She has also served as Vice President of the board of directors of the Women’s Flat Track Derby Association for the past 2 years, and has been involved with growing the sport of roller derby for over a decade. She is the
Manager of OSU’s Digital Media Project (DMP).
2016 Staff
Scott Lloyd DeWitt is an Associate Professor and Vice Chair of Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy in the Department of English at The Ohio State University, where he also has served as Director of the Digital Media Project and Director of the First-Year Writing Program. An OSU Alumni Association Distinguished Teaching Award recipient, DeWitt directed the Battelle Endowment Institute for New Media and Writing Studies in 2004. With H. Lewis Ulman and Cynthia Selfe, he has edited a collection of exhibits from the Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives called
Stories that Speak to Us. His book
Writing Inventions: Identites, Technologies, Pedagogies (SUNY 2002) won the 2003 Computers and Composition Distinguished Book Award, and he is currently examining a corpus of 5000+ pieces of student writing for a book called
The Optimistic Turn: Authentic Contexts for Peer Review in Composition Instruction. He serves as
Director of DMAC.
Cynthia Selfe is a Humanities Distinguished Professor in the Department of English at The Ohio State University. She is interested in computer use in educational settings, and in how literacy values and practices in digital environments shape, and have been shaped by historic, economic, social, cultural, material, educational, and personal factors. Selfe is the first woman and the first English teacher ever to receive the EDUCOM medal for innovative computer use in higher education. In 2000, she was presented with the Outstanding Technology Innovator award by the CCCC Committee on Computers. Most recently, she and Gail Hawisher became the first collaborative authoring/editing team to receive the 2014 CCCC Exemplar Award. She has authored or edited a number of works on digital technology, both alone and in collaboration with colleagues. With Scott DeWitt she serves as
Director of DMAC.
Erin Kathleen Bahl is a doctoral student in the Department of English at The Ohio State University studying digital media, composition, and folklore. Her research interests include the composing processes behind webtexts; vernacular religion as a creative process; and intersections between fairy tales and new media. Her work can be found in
Computers and Composition,
Composition Studies, and
Showcasing the Best of CIWIC/DMAC, with forthcoming projects in
Harlot of the Arts, Humanities Journal, and
Signs and Media. She’s excited to serve this year as
Associate Director of DMAC.
Michael Blancato is a PhD student in the English Department specializing in Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy. His research interests include labor issues in composition classrooms, online writing pedagogy, and social justice pedagogy. He is a
Technology and Instruction Consultant for DMAC 2016.
Chad Iwertz is a PhD Student in rhetoric, composition, and literacy at the Ohio State University, where he teaches courses in composition, disability studies, and digital media. Chad’s research focuses on the framing of disability in technologies of accommodation, access/accessibility in composition classrooms, and
mētis, the rhetorical concept of embodied wisdom and cunning. His work can be found in
Computers and Composition, Peitho, HĀSTAC, Teaching with Writing, Willamette Valley Voices, and
The Sigma Tau Delta Review. He is a
Technology and Instruction Consultant for DMAC 2016.
Paula Miller is working on a PhD in Rhetoric, Composition and Literacy at The Ohio State University, and she’s wrapping up her second year as a Sweetland Digital Rhetoric Collaborative Graduate Fellow. Her research interests sit at the intersection of writing center studies, digital media studies, and spatial rhetorics, interests informed by over a decade of writing center work. In her free time, she enjoys writing music, making stuff, and geeking out over new tech. She is a
Technology and Instruction Consultant for DMAC 2016.
Kristine Blair is the incoming Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences at Youngstown State University. Formerly she was a Professor in the Department of English at Bowling Green State University, where she has taught undergraduate courses in classroom technologies, and language arts, a fully online writing course for adult learners, and doctoral-level courses in computer-mediated writing theory and scholarly publishing. She has served as the editor of
Computers and Composition Online since 2002 and in 2011 she assumed the editorship of
Computers and Composition. In 2004 and 2009, she was named Outstanding Contributor to Graduate Education by the BGSU Graduate Student Senate, in 2007 she received the Technology Innovator Award from the Conference on College Composition and Communication’s 7Cs Committee, and in 2010 she received the Computers and Composition Charles Moran Award for Distinguished Contributions to the Field. She is a
Guest Lecturer for DMAC 2016.
Brenda Brueggemann received her PhD in Rhetoric from the University of Louisville in 1992. After 22 years on the faculty at The Ohio State University, she returned to Louisville to serve as the Director of Composition and Professor of English. This August, she will be taking a new position at the University of Connecticut as the Aetna Endowed Chair of Writing. In addition to interests in rhetoric, creative non-fiction, and pedagogy, much of her work focuses in Disability Studies and Deaf Studies. She has authored two books in Deaf/Disability Studies, co-authored a composition textbook, edited or co-edited five other volumes, and published over 60 essays and articles. Her current projects involve a community engagement and oral history/documentary film around the “Art as Memory” project with the Council on Developmental Disabilities, an educational blog on the Nazi’s Aktion T-4 program, and an epistolary biography of Mabel Hubbard Bell (Alexander Graham Bell’s deaf wife). She is a
Guest Lecturer for DMAC 2016.
Margaret Price’s research interests within rhetoric and composition include discourse analysis, disability studies, and digital composition. Her book Mad at School: Rhetorics of Mental Disability and Academic Life was published by University of Michigan Press in 2011. Price also publishes scholarly articles, creative essays, fiction, and poetry in venues including
College Composition and Communication, Profession, Disability Studies Quarterly, Bitch: Feminist Response to Pop Culture, and
Ms. magazine. She is a
Guest Lecturer for DMAC 2016.
Tim Lockridge is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Miami University (in Oxford, Ohio). He teaches, researches, and writes about digital publics, digital writing practices, and born-digital scholarship. He is a
Guest Lecturer for DMAC 2016.
Pamela Takayoshi researches the ways people use writing in academic and non-academic contexts to make meaning in their lives. She is particularly interested in research methodologies, the digital mediation of writing, composing processes, and feminist epistemologies. Current research projects include how transgender undergraduates experience language used about, by, and for them; the literate practices and literate spaces involved in one knitter’s learning; and a multi-researcher study of new assistant professors’ professionalization processes. She is a
Guest Lecturer for DMAC 2016.
Isaac Weiner joined the Comparative Studies department at Ohio State in Autumn 2013 as an assistant professor in religious studies. His research considers the implications of religious diversity for American public life, focusing especially on the concrete challenges that have arisen when communities have encountered each other in public spaces and how American law has mediated and shaped those encounters. He brings a multidisciplinary approach to considering these questions, with training in American religious history, legal and political theory, sensory and material culture, and theory and method in the study of religion. His first book,
Religion Out Loud: Religious Sound, Public Space, and American Pluralism (NYU Press, 2014), analyzes the politics of religious pluralism in the United States by attending to disputes about religious sound in the public realm. He also has published articles on secularism, cultural memory, and sensory history. He teaches a variety of classes on religion and American culture. He is a
Guest Lecturer for DMAC 2016.
Amy Spears is the
Director of the Digital Media Project (DMP) in the Department of English at The Ohio State University. The DMP supports teaching and research in digital media studies by centrally locating state of the art technology and expertise for teachers, students, and scholars in the Department of English. Amy and the DMP provide invaluable support and consultation for DMAC throughout the year and during the Institute. Outside of work, Amy has played competitive roller derby with the Ohio Roller Girls since the team’s first season in 2006. Before Ohio State, she worked as a web and user interface designer, and is glad to have found a job that makes good use of both her digital media skills and her degree in writing and cinema.
2015 DMAC Staff
Scott Lloyd DeWitt is an Associate Professor and Vice Chair of Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy in the Department of English at The Ohio State University, where he also has served as Director of the Digital Media Project and Director of the First-Year Writing Program. An OSU Alumni Association Distinguished Teaching Award recipient, DeWitt directed the Battelle Endowment Institute for New Media and Writing Studies in 2004. With H. Lewis Ulman and Cynthia Selfe, he has edited a collection of exhibits from the Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives called
Stories that Speak to Us. His book
Writing Inventions: Identities, Technologies, Pedagogies (SUNY 2002) won the 2003 Computers and Composition Distinguished Book Award, and he is currently examining a corpus of 5000+ pieces of student writing for a book called
The Optimistic Turn: Authentic Contexts for Peer Review in Composition Instruction. With Cynthia Selfe he serves as
Director of DMAC.
Cynthia Selfe is a Humanities Distinguished Professor in the Department of English at The Ohio State University. She is interested in computer use in educational settings, and in how literacy values and practices in digital environments shape, and have been shaped by historic, economic, social, cultural, material, educational, and personal factors. Selfe is the first woman and the first English teacher ever to receive the EDUCOM medal for innovative computer use in higher education. In 2000, she was presented with the Outstanding Technology Innovator award by the CCCC Committee on Computers. Most recently, she and Gail Hawisher became the first collaborative authoring/editing team to receive the 2014 CCCC Exemplar Award. She has authored or edited a number of works on digital technology, both alone and in collaboration with colleagues. With Scott DeWitt she serves as
Director of DMAC.
Trey Conatser is a PhD Candidate in the Department of English at The Ohio State University, where he specializes in British Romantic Literature and Digital Media Studies. His account of teaching an XML-based composition course can be found in the
Journal of Digital Humanities, and he recently taught a poetry course for which students curated multimedia poetry exhibits using the Scalar platform. Broadly, he is interested in markup languages, electronic editions, networked composing, and data visualization. His dissertation analyzes the forms, rhetoric, and ethics of confessional writing and representations of confession in British Romantic literature. With Scott DeWitt and Cynthia Selfe, he is a founding editor of
Showcasing the Best of CIWIC/DMAC, and his article “Keeping Track of DMAC: Visualizing Influence Across Space and Time” is forthcoming in
Computers and Composition Online. He currently serves as the
Associate Director of DMAC.
Kristine Blair is a Professor in the Department of English at Bowling Green State University, where she has taught undergraduate courses in classroom technologies, and language arts, a fully online writing course for adult learners, and doctoral-level courses in computer-mediated writing theory and scholarly publishing. She has served as the editor of
Computers and Composition Online since 2002 and in 2011 she assumed the editorship of
Computers and Composition. In 2004 and 2009, she was named Outstanding Contributor to Graduate Education by the BGSU Graduate Student Senate, in 2007 she received the Technology Innovator Award from the Conference on College Composition and Communication’s 7Cs Committee, and in 2010 she received the Computers and Composition Charles Moran Award for Distinguished Contributions to the Field. She is a 2014-2015 DMAC
Visiting Scholar.
Jonathan Alexander is a Professor of English, Education, and Gender & Sexuality Studies at the University of California-Irvine. He is a three-time recipient of the Ellen Nold Award for Best Articles in the field of Computers and Composition Studies. His books have been nominated for various awards, including the Lambda Literary Award. In 2011, he was awarded the Charles Moran Award for Distinguished Contributions to the Field of Computers and Writing Studies. From 2010-2013, Jonathan was named a UCI Chancellor’s Fellow in recognition of his scholarly achievements. Jonathan’s work focuses primarily on the use of emerging communications technologies in the teaching of writing and in shifting conceptions of what writing, composing, and authoring mean. He also works at the intersection of the fields of writing studies and sexuality studies, where he explores what discursive theories of sexuality have to teach us about literacy and literate practice in pluralistic democracies. He is a 2015 DMAC
Visiting Scholar.
Claire Lauer is an Associate Professor in the Technical Communication program at Arizona State University (Polytechnic Campus). Her research and teaching investigate how communication is changing as the consumption and production of multimedia and visual texts have become more ubiquitous in our culture. Specifically, she examines the terms academics and industry professionals use to describe the new kinds of digital work done in the classroom and requested of new hires. She also conducts empirical research to investigate how faculty can help students better acquire visual and multimodal literacies. She has been awarded research grants from IWCA, CWPA, and CPTSC and the Institute for Humanities research at ASU. She was recently awarded a research grant from CCC to study the new kinds of content work that professional writers are doing in the workplace. She teaches courses in visual communication, data visualization, and research methods. She is a 2015 DMAC
Visiting Scholar.
Melanie Yergeau is an Assistant Professor of English and a 2014-15 Charles P. Brauer Fellow at the Institute for the Humanities at the University of Michigan. Her academic interests include digital media studies and disability studies, and, more specifically, what the neurodiversity movement has to teach us about learning, teaching, writing, difference, and being. Melanie received the 2011 Hugh Burns Dissertation Award, and she is currently working on a book project about autism and embodied authorship. She has published in
Kairos, Computers and Composition Online, Disability Studies Quarterly, and
College English. For many years Melanie served on the board of the Autistic Self Advocacy Network (ASAN), a nonprofit organization run for and by individuals on the autism spectrum, and she currently serves on the board of the Autism National Committee (AutCom). She blogs on matters of rhetoric, autistic culture, and technology at aspierhetor.com, and for the 2015 DMAC Institute she serves as the
Senior Technology and Instruction Consultant.
Erin Kathleen Bahl is a doctoral student in the Department of English at The Ohio State University studying composition, digital media, and folklore. Her research explores culturally situated, vernacular multimodal composing practices, particularly in relation to digital storytelling and religious spaces; she is currently examining parish web design practices in the Diocese of Columbus. Erin’s work can be found in
Computers and Composition and
Composition Studies, and she is also a web layout editor for the online journal
Harlot of the Arts. Apart from her academic work, she sings first soprano in the Columbus Symphony Chorus and doodles with PowerPoint and Adobe Illustrator. Erin’s study (with Kaitlin Clinnin) of the role of community in digital learning at DMAC 2014 appears in the inaugural issue of
Showcasing the Best of CIWIC/DMAC, and she is excited to work with the DMAC community this summer as a
Technology and Instruction Consultant.
Andrew Smart is a PhD candidate in the Department of English at The Ohio State University studying American literature, film, and popular culture of the early twentieth century. His dissertation,
Books are Weapons: Didacticism in American Fiction 1890-1945, explores the persistence of didactic culture in the twentieth century, and seeks to reassess assumptions made about the value of instructional art. As a Graduate Associate with The Digital Media Project, Andrew helps instructors incorporate digital media in their courses and teaches workshops on a variety of hardware and software. In 2014 Andrew assisted with the planning and implementation of the first fully-online sections of First-Year Writing at Ohio State, and he recently has begun organizing events focusing on the critical discussion of video games. For the 2015 DMAC Institute Andrew serves as a
Technology and Instruction Consultant.
Brenda Brueggemann received her PhD in Rhetoric from the University of Louisville in 1992. After 22 years on the faculty at The Ohio State University, she returned to Louisville to serve as the Director of Composition and Professor of English. In addition to interests in rhetoric, creative non-fiction, and pedagogy, much of her work focuses in Disability Studies and Deaf Studies. She has authored two books in Deaf/Disability Studies, co-authored a composition textbook, edited or co-edited five other volumes, and published over 60 essays and articles. Her current projects involve a community engagement and oral history/documentary film around the “Art as Memory” project with the Council on Developmental Disabilities, an educational blog on the Nazi’s Aktion T-4 program, and an epistolary biography of Mabel Hubbard Bell (Alexander Graham Bell’s deaf wife). Brenda is a
Guest Lecturer for DMAC 2015.
Katie DeLuca received her PhD from The Ohio State University and will be joining the faculty this year as an Assistant Professor at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth. Katie’s research and teaching focus on the intersections of composition studies, digital media, and rhetorical history and theory. Her research on Pinterest, rhetoric, and politics can be found in the May 2015 special issue of
Kairos, and she is also a co-editor of the forthcoming collection
The Rhetoric of Participation: Interrogating Commonplaces in and beyond the Classroom (Computers and Composition Digital Press). Katie has previously served as the Associate Director of DMAC (2009-2011) and has subsequently worked as a
Guest Lecturer, a role that she will be reprising for the 2015 DMAC Institute.
Crystal VanKooten is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Writing and Rhetoric at Oakland University, specializing in new media, audio-visual composition, and writing pedagogy. She is an avid video composer herself, and she has used and developed many audio-visual, digital, and multimodal assignments in the writing classroom with students. Crystal has written about the assessment of new media in
Digital Writing Assessment and Evaluation and about the rhetoric of music in
Currents in Electronic Literacy. Her current writing and research interests include new media rhetorics and pedagogies, audio-visual research methods, and transfer in first-year composition. Before her doctoral studies, Crystal was a high school English teacher for five years, where students first introduced her to the idea of exploring the intersections between reading, writing, and technologies through blogging about literature. She worked as a Senior Instructor for the 2014 DMAC Institute, and will serve as a
Guest Lecturer for the 2015 DMAC Institute.
Beverly Moss is an Associate Professor of English at The Ohio State University, where she teaches in the Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy program, and is on the faculty at the Bread Loaf School of English. Her research and teaching interests focus on community literacy, composition theory and pedagogy, and writing center theories and practices. Some of her favorite courses to teach are “Memory in African American Literary and Public Discourse” and “Issues and Methods in Tutoring Writing.” Her books include
Literacy Across Communities and
A Community Text Arises: A Literate Text and a Literacy Tradition in African American Churches. She is a
Guest Lecturer at the 2015 DMAC Institute.
Amy Spears is the
Director of the Digital Media Project (DMP) in the Department of English at The Ohio State University. The DMP supports teaching and research in digital media studies by centrally locating state of the art technology and expertise for teachers, students, and scholars in the Department of English. Amy and the DMP provide invaluable support and consultation for DMAC throughout the year and during the Institute. Outside of work, Amy has played competitive roller derby with the Ohio Roller Girls since the team’s first season in 2006. Before Ohio State, she worked as a web and user interface designer, and is glad to have found a job that makes good use of both her digital media skills and her degree in writing and cinema.