blog posts

• Deborah Brandt's Visit Postponed

  Feb 24, 2016 12:00 pm17 views

  Due to today's storm, Prof. Brandt will not able to travel here in time for her Colloquium Talk tomorrow. We have decided to reschedule her visit. All of the events on her itinerary for tomorrow are cancelled. Thank you again for your support of her visit, and we look forward to hosting her sometime in the future. 

• Reflecting on Jeff Rice's "Craft Identities"

  Feb 5, 2016 1:30 pm58 views

  Last week, we were pleased to welcome to campus Jeff Rice, Professor of Writing, Rhetoric, and Digital Studies at the University of Kentucky. Professor Rice’s talk, “Craft Identities,” was part of the 2015-2016 CWS Colloquium Speaker Series. To say that Rice’s talk was about craft beer would be like saying Discipline and Punish is about prisons. It is and it isn’t. Taking craft beer as a kind of carabiner, Rice’s talk weaved through anecdotal repetitions, interruptions, and multiple beginnings, a kind of Burkean perspective by incongruity that demonstrated how identities are crafted across print, digital, and material spaces.  In “One Always Fails in Speaking of What One Loves,” Roland Barthes writes “Music constitutes a kind of primal state of pleasure: it produces a pleasure one always tries to recapture but never to explain; hence, it is the site of the pure effect, a central notion of the Stendhalian aesthetic.” If music is the degree zero in Stendahl’s Italian system, beer may be said to be the degree zero of Rice’s craft network, both signifying and producing anecdotes, identities, relationships, events.

  While there was much to reflect on in this talk (especially as someone who is herself both constructing and constructed by the network of craft beer), I find myself repeatedly returning to the role of the personal in Rice’s work, the way he stitches together pleasure, surprise, and desire with the logics and narrative gestures of both craft beer and social media. He says, “In this sense, I’m also searching for an identity outside of an industry’s identity: mine, and that of experiences that I want to share. I call this identity a “craft identity,” for it is based in the logic of craft beer, consumption shaping a sense of who I am, as well as social media, that RateBeer experience that marks my initiation into shared participation. The basis of a transmedia identity is that various items that shape who I am come from disparate sites and create conflicting, almost mythic meanings.” Through what he elsewhere calls “personal weaving,”   Rice not only explained, but performed this craft identity, through interruptions and contagions of grand narratives and by scanning not for the confident ethos of grand narratives, but for “the mystical and mythical nature of craft relationships.”

  If you'd like to listen to "Craft Identities," a recording is available to stream in the CWS Colloquium Archive. 

• WAM Professional Development with Professor Jeff Rice

  Feb 3, 2016 10:30 am39 views

  During Jeff Rice’s recent visit to the Center for Writing Studies, he met with current instructors of the Center’s Writing Across Media class for breakfast and conversation at Courier Café. Over always-amazing eggs and hash browns, WAM instructors Annie Kelvie, Katherine Flowers, and Kaia Simon shared our approaches and experiences teaching WAM with one of the scholars whose scholarly work influences the course.

   

• Upcoming Talks and Events on Campus

  Nov 13, 2015 8:30 am11 views

  

  
  
  

  Upcoming talks and events on campus include: 

  Lunch-time talk by Dr. Carolyn Wisniewski, Director of the U of I Writers Workshop.  The talk is about a study about the development of teaching knowledge and practice among twelve novice graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) of college composition. [Wed Nov. 18th @ Noon -> English Building 107A]

  Talk by Tom McNamara titled “'Burning Dollars': Chinese Undergraduates and Investment in the US Writing Classroom" [Thurs Nov. 19h @ 4pm -> GSLIS 126]

   

• Writing Across Media

  Oct 30, 2015 3:00 pm12 views

  We have four sections of our Writing Across Media class going strong this semester. Learn more about this innovative undergratuate class at cws.illinois.edu/wam. The course fulfills the University's Advanced Composition requirement, along with over 100 other classes on campus. 

   

  

• Sixth Annual Gesa Kirsch Graduate Student Symposium

  Mar 13, 2015 10:15 am56 views

  The Center for Writing Studies conference planning committee invites proposals for the Sixth Annual Gesa Kirsch and Center for Writing Studies Graduate Student Symposium held on Friday, April 24, 2015 from 8:30am-4:30pm. Graduate students from all departments are welcome to present on topics of interest within writing, literacy, discourse, rhetoric, education, and communication. The symposium is a supportive conference where graduate students can present and receive feedback from a small, interested group of peers and faculty.

  We encourage a range of presentation types, from traditional papers to multimodal, performative, reflective, or experimental projects. Please send a title and short abstract (100-200 words) to Kaia Simon (simonpo2@illinois.edu) by April 3, 2015. Specify your preference for either a 10- or 20-minute presentation and any restrictions on your availability for April 24.

  Both Breakfast and lunch will be provided.We look forward to seeing you at the Symposium!

• CWS@4C15

  Mar 9, 2015 7:45 am55 views

  The 2015 Conference on College Composition and Communication is fast approaching, and we are so proud of the many scholars affiliated with the Center for Writing Studies who will be participating in workshops, roundtables, panels, and poster sessions. For a list of CWS faculty, graduate students, and alumni who will be presenting papers at 4Cs this year, please visit the CWS Blog by clicking on the title above. See you in Tampa!

   

   

• From the Director: Welcome and Good News

  Sep 9, 2014 1:45 pm112 views

  As we begin the 2014-2015 academic year, we have many exciting announcements to share with the CWS community. First, we have an engaging line up of visiting and residential speakers for our Colloquium and Brown Bag series. In Fall 2014, we look forward to visits by Sandra Jamieson of Drew University, whose visit is co-sponsored by the Undergraduate Rhetoric Program and who will present at the Colloquium on September 29^th. We also look forward to a visit from Christine Tardy of the University of Arizona, who is scheduled to give a talk at the Colloquium on October 23^rd. In Spring 2014, our scheduled Colloquium speakers are Scott Wible of the University of Maryland, and Marcelle Haddix of Syracuse University.

  Brown bag sessions in Fall 2014 will be on teaching in our WAM (Writing Across Media) program (September 17), as well as talks by two new English faculty and Core and Affiliate CWS faculty, respectively: Visiting Assistant Professor John Gallagher (October 1) and Assistant Professor Eric Pritchard (November 12). We round out our semester of brown bag events with a talk by Postdoctoral Fellow in Writing and New Learning Ecologies Anna Smith (October 15). All our brown bags are Wednesdays from 12-1 PM in English Building Room 228; bring your lunch and join us for some great conversations!

  We also want to celebrate the new faculty positions of three Writing Studies students who completed their PhD work in Spring 2014. These are Sonia Kline (Assistant Professor of Elementary Education at Illinois State University), Ligia Mihut (Lecturer at Barry University), and Andrea Olinger (Assistant Professor of English at the University of Louisville). Please join me in congratulating these graduates on their new positions!

  In other good news, two CWS graduate students were honored in May 2014 at the Rhetoric Society of America annual conference in San Antonio for their scholarly work: Katie Irwin (Gerard A. Hauser Award for “From Mob Violence to Violence against Women: Lynching Appropriation and the Case of PUMA”) and Pamela Saunders (Gerard A. Hauser Award for “Disabling Counterpublics: Examining Competing Discourses of Autism Advocacy in the Public Sphere”). Our new colleague Eric Pritchard was also honored with the first CCCC Lavender Award for LGBT scholarship, based on his “For Colored Kids Who Committed Suicide, Our Outrage Isn't Enough: Queer Youth of Color, Bullying, and the Discursive Limits of Identity and Safety” which appeared in the Summer 2013 issue of Harvard Educational Review. Last but certainly not least, our colleague Catherine Prendergast was honored with a prestigious Guggenheim fellowship for her project, Writer, Painter, Banker, Thief: The American Arts Colony in the Public Account.

  In still more good news, we have four new English department graduate students who have joined our ranks in the CWS program, and our Writing Studies concentration. These are M.A. students Alison Kranek, Maria Carvajal Regidor, and Paul Beilstein, and Ph.D. student Evin Groundwater. We happily welcome these four to our CWS community!

  Finally, as I assume the position of interim director of CWS for this year, I want to thank outgoing CWS director Paul Prior (who is now on sabbatical—best wishes, Paul!) for his kind support and guidance in helping me make the transition to this position, as well as my other CWS colleagues—particularly staff member Amy Rumsey, who has also provided me with infinitely patient assistance. Leading both CWS and the Undergraduate Rhetoric Program will be a formidable challenge, but one I welcome, as I hope this temporary union will allow us to create an even greater culture of writing at UIUC from the first year through graduate levels. 

• Gesa E. Kirsch CWS Graduate Student Symposium

  Feb 17, 2014 3:45 pm54 views

  The Center for Writing Studies conference planning committee invites proposals for the 5th Annual Gesa E. Kirsch CWS Graduate Student Symposium, April 25, 2014, from 8:30 am-4:30 pm. Graduate students from all departments are welcome to present on topics of interest within writing, literacy, discourse, rhetoric, education, and communication. The symposium is a supportive conference where graduate students can present and receive feedback from a small, interested group of peers and faculty.
  
  We encourage a range of presentation types, from traditional papers to multimodal, performative, reflective, or experimental projects.  Please send a title and short abstract (100-200 words) to Kaia Simon (simonpo2@illinois.edu) by April 4, 2014. Specify your preference for either a 10- or 20-minute presentation.
  
  Additionally, one session of the Symposium will provide an opportunity for small-group workshops. This workshop session is designed to be a writing group experience for graduate students to get feedback on written work, including seminar papers and/or upcoming conference papers. To participate, contact Kaia Simon (simonpo2@illinois.edu) by April 4, 2014.
  
  Breakfast and lunch will be provided.
  
  

• Good News from CWS

  Aug 21, 2013 9:08 am215 views

  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....  Click the title above to read more!

• Virginia Kuhn, "Filmic Texts, Future Texts: From Keywords to Keyframes"

  May 16, 2013 10:15 am57 views

   

  When: Thursday, May 23th at 3:00 pm

  Where: English Building 160

  Sponsored by NCSA, iCHASS, & ISDA

  Abstract: Filmic media (aka video) is an increasingly ubiquitous mode of expression and communication brought about by the rise of consumer grade video cameras and other mobile devices (smart phones, iPads, flip cams) on the one hand,  and improvements in graphics processing units for networked editing and cloud based video hosting on the other. These technologies allow both the recording and the dissemination of video in ways that are utterly unprecedented. However,  we have yet to see its real potential. This presentation will focus on the radical potential of video and its implications for transforming research,  scholarship and pedagogy.
  

  Bio: Virginia Kuhn serves as associate director of the Institute for Multimedia Literacy and associate professor of cinema practice in the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California. She directs an undergraduate Honors program, oversees faculty in the IML Digital Studies minor and teaches a variety of graduate and undergraduate classes in new media, all of which marry theory and practice. Committed to helping shape open source tools for scholarship, she recently published the first article created in the authoring platform, Scalar. “Filmic Texts and the Rise of the Fifth Estate” appeared in the International Journal of Learning and Media, she just completed editing her second peer-reviewed digital anthology titled, MoMLA: From Gallery to Webtext, and co-authored a chapter in Digital Humanities Pedagogy: Practices, Policies and Politics, which was published by the pioneering UK-based scholarly press, Open Book Publishers.

   

• Second Language Writing: An Overview of the Development of the Discipline

  Apr 4, 2013 2:45 pm116 views

  Tony Silva, Purdue University: "Second Language Writing: An Overview of the Development of the Discipline"
  Date: Thursday, April 11
  Time: 4-5 pm
  Place: Lucy Ellis Lounge, Foreign Languages Building

  Abstract: In describing the development of second language writing (L2W) studies, I will (1) stipulate a definition of L2W; (2) examine trends in the development of L2W decade by decade from 1950 to the present—by looking at the numbers and areas of focus of the relevant publicly available documents, by mentioning important contributors to the field, and by examining such issues as theory, inquiry paradigms, types of inquiry (empirical and hermeneutic), instructional practices, and the creation of infrastructure; (3) assess the current status of L2W studies around the globe; (4) provide a description of the current status of L2W as an incipient discipline; (5) speculate on the future of L2W studies; and (6) provide a list of resources for further inquiry.

• IPRH Panel: The Future of Authorship

  Feb 18, 2013 1:45 pm38 views

  Panel: The Future of Authorship (Brown Bag Lunch)
  Date: February 22, 2013
  Time: 12:00 p.m. - 2:00 p.m.
  Location: IPRH, Humanities Lecture Hall
  
  About the event:
  This panel will examine recently developed forms of scholarly communication, focusing on the ways scholars now create knowledge and communicate their findings to a range of audiences using innovative digital platforms and tools for conducting research, writing, and publishing. The aim of this panel is to explore the intellectual advances afforded by new modes of authorship, peer review, and publishing. Please join us for a panel discussion featuring the following speakers:
  
  Nicholas Mirzoeff (Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University);
  Kevin Hamilton (Associate Professor of Art and Design, and IPRH Coordinator of Digital Scholarly Communication, UIUC);
  Eduardo Ledesma (Assistant Professor of Spanish, UIUC)
  Jodee Stanley (Editor, Ninth Letter)
  
  Please bring your lunch. Cookies and beverages will be provided.

• IPRH lecture Richard Graff

  Jan 22, 2013 1:30 pm71 views

  Richard Graff 
(Writing Studies, University of Minnesota)

  
“Spaces of Oratorical Performance in Ancient Greece:  Reconstruction, Interpretive Visualization, and Assessment”


  Date: January 30, 2013


  Time: 4:30 p.m.


  Location: 1000 Lincoln Hall



  This event is free and open to the public.

  
About this event:

This talk will present chief findings of a long-term collaborative, interdisciplinary study of the physical settings in which ancient Greeks practiced the art of rhetoric. These include a variety spaces and structures from the late-Archaic, Classical, and Hellenistic periods (ca. 500-100 BCE) utilized throughout the Greek world as venues for the performance of formal oratory-- principally, buildings that housed meetings of city councils (bouleuteria), auditoria utilized for larger citizen assemblies, and various structures fitted for use as law courts. In addition to providing a much-needed synthesis of the archaeological, literary, and historical evidence for these spaces and structures, the study utilizes both traditional and emergent research methods to elucidate the ways in which the physical settings structured communicative (inter)action and group deliberation.  3D digital modeling and other forms of advanced visualization have been utilized to identify salient architectural-spatial and acoustical variables and to assess them in terms of the opportunities and challenges they presented to both speakers and audiences.

  The talk will summarize the inventory of speaking sites considered in the study and the methods of analysis and interpretation utilized in it. It will then illustrate these methods by considering a few significant but neglected structures, and a single well-known, but enigmatic one -- the meeting place of the Athenian assembly called the Pnyx.

• Summer and Fall 2012 in the Center for Writing Studies

  Dec 11, 2012 10:00 am95 views

  Summer and Fall 2012 in the Center for Writing Studies has been an active time and we have much to celebrate. Between May and August, four students completed their graduate concentrations and headed off to new positions:  Jessica Bannon as Assistant Professor of English at the University of Indianapolis, Lauren Marshall Bowen as Assistant Professor of Humanities at Michigan Technological University, Amber Buck as Assistant Professor of English at CUNY-Staten Island, and Cory Holding as Assistant Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh. We miss their many contributions here, but know that they are going on to contribute much to their new institutions and the field.

  In May, I led a three-day Faculty WAC Seminar and enjoyed working with a great group of 15 professors from five colleges. In August, Jon Stone and I led a two-day WAC seminar for a similarly diverse group of 26 graduate students.

  The University of Illinois Writing Project offered its fourth Summer Institute, summer writing camps for local elementary and secondary students, and a fall conference. The excellence of UIWP was also recognized as we obtained funding for the second year from the Office of Public Engagement.

  The Fall also featured two colloquia, with visits by Valerie Kinloch and Daniel Perrin, both of whom gave fascinating talks and also had meetings with a number of graduate students and professors. We also had three brownbag meetings, with talks by Robert McChesney and Lindsay Russell and an information session on our Writing across Media (WAM) courses, with the participation of our current instructors (Alexandra Cavallaro, Kaitlin Marks-Dubbs, and Melissa Larabee).

  The Writers Workshop also had an active Fall as can be seen from their newsletter.

  In Alumni news, please join me in congratulating Amy Wan, now Assistant Professor of English at Queens College, CUNY, as her 2011 article “In the Name of Citizenship: The Writing Classroom and the Promise of Citizenship” was selected for the Richard Ohmann Outstanding Article in College English Journal Award!
  

  In personnel news, Andrea Olinger has agreed to take up duties as an Assistant Director of CWS in the Spring, working with Jon Stone, and Alexandra Cavallaro has agreed to take an Assistant Director position starting in Fall, with Andrea and Allie then working together jointly in 2013-14. Julia Smith will begin teaching a WAM section in Spring. Welcome and thanks to all of them!

  This fall we also were also very happy to have Lindsay Russell (English) join CWS as a Core Faculty member and Safiya Umoja Noble (African American Studies) as an Affiliated Faculty member. Welcome to them both.

  Finally, the Spring will bring a colloquium by Mary Juzwik (Michigan State) in March and Xiaoye You (Penn State) in April, two graduate student research forums (the first in February featuring Rebecca Woodard and Sonia Kline), brownbags to be announced, and our third Gesa Kirsch Graduate Research Symposium with alumna Christa Olson (now at UW-Madison) as our keynote speaker. In the meantime, I wish everyone happy and peaceful holidays.

  Paul Prior, Director of the Center for Writing Studies

• Site redesign, new blog, and academic year recap

  May 2, 2012 3:15 pm482 views

   

  Welcome to a slightly redesigned site for the Center for Writing Studies. We've made a few changes to make the site easier to navigate and more useful. 

  In particular, we've changed the layout of menu items to make it easier to find some of our activities (our Writing Across Media course, UIWP, and the Center's Speaker Series). The calendar of upcoming events has been moved to a side panel and in its place we now have this blog, a more dynamic and flexible space that will allow us to post a wide variety of information that may be of interest to Center For Writing Studies students, faculty, and visitors. If there is information you would like to have posted, submit it to our Assistant Director, Jon Stone (jwstone2@illinois.edu), for review. We invite news about conferences, calls for papers, events of interest around campus, and other relevant information and news. The blog is RSS enabled for those who would like to subscribe for external viewing. 

  We've also added a link that allows for secure donations to support special CWS programs and activities. 

  We want to acknowledge the close of a wonderful 2011-2012 academic year. We've had the privilege of hosting or co-hosting a wide variety of visiting scholars including Danielle DeVoss, Jonathan Alexander, Morris Young, Ralph Cintron, Neal Lerner, and CWS alum Derek Van Ittersum. Our Colloquium has also hosted talks by CWS graduate students: John O'Connor and Vanessa Roullion in the Fall and Heather Blain and Julia Smith this Spring. Our brownbag series has featured talks from Sharra Vostral, Brendesha Tynes, Lisa Nakamura, another visiting alum, Jody Skipka, and a group of graduate students (Jessica Bannon, Lauren Marshall Bowen, Amber Buck, Cory Holding, and Martha Webber) discussing their (successful) experiences on the job market. We also hosted thr 3rd annual Gesa Kirsch CWS Graduate Student Symposium. Our special thanks to everyone who participated in these events.. 

  We look forward to another great year in 2012-13 and wish you all a peaceful and productive summer.