Good News from CWS
It is not always easy to find good news in any medium, but we have a lot to share as the new semester starts. This fall, CWS is looking forward to visits by Mary Juzwik, who will present at the Colloquium on October 24 and the University of Illinois Writing Project Fall Conference on October 26, and Maisha (Fisher) Winn, who will present at the colloquium on December 5. CWS is also co-sponsoring a visit by James Gee, who will talk on new literacies and video games, at the Symposium on Activity-Based Approaches to Communication, October 5. Kaitlin Marks-Dubbs and Ligia Mihut will present their dissertation work at a Graduate Research Forum on October 17. We are looking forward to colloquia by Jordynn Jack and Brian Street in the spring.
I am also happy to announce that we have a new Core Faculty member of CWS, Kelly Ritter, Professor of English and incoming Director of First-Year Rhetoric.
We want to celebrate as well the new positions of six Writing Studies students, who completed their PhD work in the last year: Michael Burns (Assistant Professor of English with a specialization in Composition/Rhetoric and African American Rhetoric(s) at West Chester University); Amy Herb (WAC Lecturer I in the Program of Writing and Humanistic Studies at Massachusetts Institute of Technology); Vanessa Rouillon (Assistant Professor in the School of Writing, Rhetoric, and Technical Communication at James Madison University); Heather Blain Vorhies (Post-Doctoral Fellow, Office of Writing Initiatives, The Graduate School, University of Maryland, College Park); Martha Webber (Assistant Professor in the Department of English, Comparative Literature, and Linguistics at California State University Fullerton); and Rebecca Woodard (Assistant Professor in Curriculum and Instruction in the Literacy, Language, & Culture Department at University of Illinois at Chicago). Please join me in congratulating them on their new positions.
Finally, several CWS alumni and faculty won awards in the spring. Congratulations to Patrick Berry, Gail Hawisher, and Cynthia Selfe, whose Transnational Literate Lives in Digital Times won two Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) Book Awards, the 2013 Advancement in Knowledge Award and the 2013 Research Impact Award; to Steve Lamos, whose Interest and Opportunities: Race, Racism and University Writing Instruction in the Post-Civil Rights Era received a special commendation from the 2013 CCCC Outstanding Book Award selection committee; and to Lindsay Rose Russell, whose dissertation, Women in the English Language Dictionary, won the 2013 Rhetoric Society of America Dissertation Award.