Special Assistant to the Provost for Writing
Klapper Hall, Room 634
718-997-4673
[email protected]
Research Interests
My research is guided by an interest in how literacy is used for citizen-making in school and non-school settings and in how change happens within institutions. My book, Producing Good Citizens: Literacy Training in Anxious Times (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014), examines citizenship, literacy, and the productive worker-citizen in the United States. Drawing on literacy studies, composition history, and citizenship theory, along with historical evidence of U.S. immigration and labor practices and policies in the early 20th century (1910-1929), the book constructs a history of work-inflected citizenship and the role of literacy in its cultivation and complicates liberatory and participatory notions of citizenship commonly taken up by contemporary literacy teachers. It analyzes how literacy is imagined to solve inequality by conferring, defining, and producing the status of citizenship and by extension, how literacy training instructs individuals to enact civic obligations, whether local or national.
My current research examines contemporary policy around language diversity, multilingual writers, and international students in the context of diversity and access rhetoric in U.S. higher education in the 20th century and of the construction of the global university in the 21st century. I am also working on two edited collections–one on Asian American rhetoric and one on writing at CUNY. I also have written about immigration policy and the rhetoric of the labor reform movement, and I am currently the co-PI for a $1.7 million U.S. Department of Education AANAPISI grant awarded to Queens College in 2022, which funds the Queens College AANAPISI Project (QCAP).
Teaching Interests
I teach courses about writing and the teaching of writing. My first-year writing courses have been on topics like language and literacy, higher education, and food. I have also taught advanced writing courses in the writing minor, creative non-fiction to undergraduates, and writing pedagogy, composition theory, and literacy studies to secondary teachers and graduate instructors. I have also facilitated a number of pedagogy workshops on topics such as antiracist writing pedagogies, linguistic justice, designing writing assignments for all students, and giving feedback to multilingual students.
Selected Publications
“From Post-War Boom to Global University: Enacting Equity in the Open Doors Policies of Mass Higher Education.” College Composition and Communication, September 2022. Recipient of the 2023 Richard Braddock Outstanding Article Award.
“Beyond ‘Bad’ Cops: Historicizing and Resisting Surveillance Culture in the Classroom,” with Lindsey Albracht (invited), JAm It! (Journal of American Studies in Italy), no. 5, December 2021.
“Making Sense of Researcher Positionality in Foundational Literacy Studies Research.” Literacy in Composition Studies, winter 2021.
“Beyond Crisis Moments: Mediating Instructor-Student Conflict Through Anti-Racist Practice” (with Christopher Williams). WPA Journal, fall 2021.
“Cultivating Multimodality from the Multilingual Epicenter: Queens, ‘The Next America’” (with Eunjeong Lee and Sara P. Alvarez). Journal of Global Literacies, Technologies, and Emerging Pedagogies. Special issue on Multimodal Compositions in Multilingual Contexts, February 2021.
“Workin’ Languages: Who We Are Matters to Our Writing” (with Sara P. Alvarez and Eunjeong Lee) Writing Spaces, vol. 4, 2021.
“Rhetoric, Deliberation, and Democracy in an Era of Standards.” College English, May 2015.
Producing Good Citizens: Literacy Training in Anxious Times. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014.
“In the Name of Citizenship: The Writing Classroom and the Promise of Citizenship,” College English. 74.1 (2011). Recipient of the 2012 Richard Ohmann Outstanding Article Award.
