Contributor Bios
Phil Bratta is an assistant professor of Rhetoric and Writing Studies in the Department of English at Oklahoma State University. His work uses an interdisciplinary approach to digital-visual rhetorics, cultural rhetorics, embodiment, and pedagogy. He has published or has forthcoming work in edited collections, as well as College Composition and Communication, Rhetoric Review, Computers and Composition, Enculturation, Feminist Teacher, Visual Culture and Gender, and The Journal of American Culture.
Lori Beth De Hertogh is an assistant professor in the School of Writing, Rhetoric and Technical Communication at James Madison University. Her work has appeared in the Journal of Business and Technical Communication, Computers and Composition, Enculturation, Peitho, The Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics, and Composition Forum. Additional information about her scholarship and teaching is available at www.loribethdehertogh.com.
Urmitapa Dutta is an associate professor of Psychology at University of Massachusetts Lowell specializing in decolonial feminist theory and research. A scholar activist, her program of research focuses on everyday violence, i.e., forms of direct, structural, and symbolic violence that are normalized and become endemic to the social fabric. Working alongside and in solidarity with communities/groups in the U.S. and in India, she uses critical qualitative community-based methodologies to denaturalize oppressive conditions and to articulate experiences that are silenced by officially sanctioned narratives.
Natalie Fleming is a PhD candidate in the American Studies program in the University at Buffalo's Transnational Studies Department. In 2012, she received her Master’s Degree in art history at Rutgers University. She currently works as an independent curator and educator based in New York City. She has curated numerous exhibitions, including Art Stands Still (2019, Collar Works, Troy, New York), Three Acts, Three Scenes: Your Care, My Care, Careful Care (2018, Kunstraum Gallery, Brooklyn) Forging American: Art in the Workings of an Asian American Rust Belt (2017, Big Orbit Gallery, CEPA, Buffalo) and The Measure of All Things: Rethinking Humanism through Art (2016, University at Buffalo Department of Art Gallery). From 2014 until 2017, she supervised the University at Buffalo Department of Art Gallery and Project Space. She has worked in several other museums and galleries, including the New-York Historical Society, Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum and the Putnam History Museum. She has taught modern, contemporary and American art history courses at SUNY University at Buffalo, the Rochester Institute of Technology, and D’Youville College, Buffalo, NY.
Steven Hammer is an assistant professor of Communication and Media Studies at Saint Joseph’s University, where he researches and teaches courses in multimedia production, creative-critical research, and accessibility/disability studies.
Ames Hawkins is a creative-critical scholar, transgenre writer, and the author of These are Love(d) Letters, an award-winning, genre-bending visual memoir and work of literary nonfiction. Their work appears in a number of edited volumes, and across a range of academic and literary publications—both print and online—such as Pre/Text, The Ocean State Review, Constellations, Palaver Journal, enculturation, Slag Glass City, The Feminist Wire, The Rumpus, and Water~Stone Review. A Professor of English and Creative Writing, and the Associate Provost for Faculty Research and Development at Columbia College Chicago, Hawkins also co-hosted and co-producted the scholarly podcast Masters of Text.
Cody Jackson is a community-accountable (Alexis Pauline Gumbs; Eric Darnell Pritchard) scholar-teacher whose work focuses on disability studies, queer studies, and the transformation of media technology. As an undergraduate at Arkansas State University in Jonesboro, Arkansas, Cody was a co-founder and President of the A-State Feminist Union. In February 2016, the Feminist Union hosted the Rural Freaks Conference on Marginalization, Liminality, and Queerness in Rural Spaces. In August 2016, Cody moved to Denton, Texas, to attend Texas Woman’s University, where he graduated with an M.A. in English in August 2018. Now at Texas Christian University, Cody’s research and pedagogy are focused on the intersections between queerness, disability, and archival praxis. Cody explores the material implications and influences of anti-ableist composition, theories of time and composing, and queer composition studies. Cody is currently working on a larger set of projects that address the ways material conditions of graduate students and contingent faculty impact circulations of knowledge and disciplinarity. He is currently the Book Review editor for the Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics and a co-chair for the Disability Studies Standing Group for the Conference on College Composition and Communication.
Rachel C. Jackson (Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma) is an assistant professor of Native American Literatures and Rhetorics at the University of Oklahoma. Her research examines local activist rhetorical strategies in the context of historical suppression, particularly as activist rhetorics operate transrhetorically across cultural locations to build collective action. Her community-engaged projects focus on sustaining Native American languages and cultural literacies and forwarding Indigenous voices and perspectives for decolonial futures. She works with tribal leaders and community members across Oklahoma to develop and implement classes, workshops, and digital humanities projects. Her work has appeared in College Composition and Communication, College English, Community Literacy Journal, and Rhetoric Review. She is a Ford Foundation Fellow, a Fellow with the Newberry Consortium on American Indian Studies, and a recipient of the 2017 Berlin Award and 2017 Ohmann Award from the National Council of Teachers of English.
Abigail Lambke is an associate professor of English and the Writing Center Director at Avila University in Kansas City, MO where she teaches courses in composition, rhetoric, literature, women’s studies, and community engagement. Her scholarship centers broadly on sonic rhetorics and her publications can be listened to in digital journals such as Present Tense and Kairos.
Seán McCarthy is an associate professor in the School of Writing, Rhetoric and Technical Communication at James Madison University (JMU). Seán’s primary research and teaching interests are situated at the intersection of community engagement and digital literacies and cultures. He is also experienced in project-focused, interdisciplinary teaching and research, largely through his role as a lead instructor and course designer at JMU X-Labs, an undergraduate-focused innovation program. For the past six years Seán has taught a faculty seminar in digital humanities pedagogy for the College of Arts and Letters at JMU, and he currently serves as a faculty fellow at the Gilliam Center for Entrepreneurship.
Conor Moynihan is the Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial Fellow in Prints, Drawings, and Photographs at RISD Museum and a Visual Studies PhD candidate at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York. His dissertation draws attention to the contemporary forms of orientalism, primitivism, and exoticism in art and performance. More generally, he attends to transnational artists dealing with gender, sexuality, and ability, specifically focusing on artistic practices that move transnationally from/between the Middle East, North Africa, Turkey, and Iran to European and North American spaces. Moynihan curated Drama Queer in Vancouver, BC (with Jonathan D. Katz, 2016), Ill at Ease: Dis-ease in Art in Buffalo, New York (2017), and Three Act, Three Scenes: My Care, Your Care, Careful Care in Brooklyn, New York (with Natalie Fleming, 2018). He has taught art history at the University at Buffalo (Buffalo, NY), the State University of New York at Fredonia (Fredonia, NY), and D'Youville College (Buffalo, NY).
Maria Novotny is an assistant professor of English and at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. As a community-engaged scholar, she co-directs The ART of Infertility which curates exhibits featuring patient perspectives of reproductive loss. Her research has been published in Computers & Composition, Communication Design Quarterly, Harlot, Peitho, Reflections, and Technical Communication Quarterly.
Ashley Pryor, Ph.D. is the Associate Dean and Chair of Faculty and Associate Professor of the Humanities in the Jesup Scott Honors College at the University of Toledo. Whew! That’s a mouthful! I am also a (largely) self-taught visual artist with a special interest in digital and analog collage (the majority of my published work appears under the name Ashley Geiger). While my doctorate is in Philosophy, I have always been an intellectual mutt. As an undergraduate, I majored in Art History and Philosophy, and as a graduate student my primary interest was in the relationship of Literature and Philosophy. Collage appeals to my innate disdain for fixed categories, genres, and aesthetics. It encourages endless juxtapositions, and playful reconfigurations --the more unexpected the better. It is an art practice that is open about its theft – ahem—I mean creative appropriation (although we collage artists too have a healthy concern to stay on the right side of copyright law).
Vanessa Rouillon is an assistant professor of Writing and Rhetoric at James Madison University. She deems herself a public historian with publications in community journals in Illinois. Dr. Rouillon is a community activist who has written about the African American experience during the early to mid 1900s; she has authored a documentary on a crucial, but neglected, Black figure--Albert R. Lee, the "unofficial" but first dean of African American students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is currently writing Lee's biography.
Genoa Shepley serves as lecturer and assistant director of first-year writing at the University of Rhode Island. Her area of specialization is visual rhetoric and the relationship between text and images in a historical context. She has served as director of communications for a major museum of modern art and director of publications for an art college and its gallery of contemporary art. Her work has appeared in a variety of publications from popular art publications to scholarly journals.
Barbara Schneider is the Associate Vice Provost for Assessment, Accreditation, Program Review, and Faculty Development at the University of Toledo. It’s an awkward title for an introduction at a dinner, but a satisfying job. My doctorate is in English studies with a concentration in rhetoric and composition, so I served as director of Composition and director of the Writing Center for more than ten years before stepping onto the administrative track. I have successfully written numerous academic articles, chapters, policy statements, and a book. I sometimes enjoy reading what I wrote in those venues, but I rarely enjoy writing them. This project was my first foray into creative non-fiction since my years as a newspaper columnist, and it was both more fun and more intimidating.
Greg Sieber is pursuing graduate degrees at Drexel University in Design Research and Science, Technology & Society. His research falls at an intersection of these disciplines and uses speculative design to investigate the construction of socio-technical imaginaries.
Karrieann Soto Vega, is assistant professor of Writing, Rhetoric and Digital Studies at the University of Kentucky, and affiliate faculty of the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies, as well as the Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx Studies Program. Her scholarship focuses on decolonial feminist rhetorics, multimodal activism, and Puerto Rican cultural rhetorics. In various ways, she has worked with music throughout all her life, whether trying to learn different instruments, dancing, as part of the school choir, jamming, or studying the composition processes of Puerto Rican indie rock musicians. She has been a producer for This Rhetorical Life podcast and a consistent karaoke enthusiast.
Jenna Vinson is an associate professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Lowell specializing in feminist rhetorical studies. Her book, Embodying the Problem: The Persuasive Power of the Teen Mother, challenges the pathologizing discourses of teenage pregnancy and investigates the creative strategies some young mothering women use to resist negative representations of their lives. Her articles have appeared in journals such as Feminist Formations, Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy, and Sexuality Research and Social Policy.
Stephanie West-Puckett is an assistant professor of Writing and Rhetoric and director of first-year writing at the University of Rhode Island. Her research focuses on equity, access, and diversity in writing curriculum and assessment, and she specializes in digital, queer, and maker-centered composition practices. In 2018, her dissertation won the College Composition and Communication Lavender Rhetorics award for queer interventions in writing studies theory and practice, and her scholarship has been published in College English, Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher Education, as well as in several edited collections.