Speakers

Janet Giltrow, University of British Columbia
"Bridge-toGenre: Spanning Medial Change" (video)
Janet Giltrow is Professor of English and Associate Dean of Arts at the University of British Columbia. Taking rhetorical and linguistics approaches to discourse studies, she has published extensively on literary and non-literary stylistics; genre theory; ideologies of language; and academic writing, including two textbooks (Academic Writing: Writing and Reading in the Disciplines, 3rd ed., 2001; Introduction to Academic Writing, 2nd ed., 2010). Her most recent publications include Genres in the Internet, ed. with D. Stein (2009), "Genre as Difference: The Sociality of Syntactic Variation" (2010), "'Curious Gentleman': The Hudson's Bay Company and the Royal Society, Business and Science in the Eighteenth Century" (2012), and "The Pragmatics of Genre on the Internet" (forthcoming, 2013). 

Lisa Gitelman, New York University 
"Amateurdom and Its Discontents, Or, What Is a Zine?" (video)
Lisa Gitelman is a media historian and Professor in the departments of English and Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. She is particularly concerned with tracing the patterns according to which new media become meaningful within and against the contexts of older media. Her most recent book is titled Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture (MIT Press, 2006). Her current projects include a monograph, "The Scriptural Economy: A Media History of Documents," and an edited collection, "'Raw Data' Is an Oxymoron." She holds a Ph.D. in English from Columbia University and is  a former editor of the Thomas A. Edison Papers at Rutgers University. 

David Herman, The Ohio State University
"Narrative Worldmaking in Words and Images" (video)
David Herman is Arts and Humanities Distinguished Professor in the Department of English at Ohio State University. Currently focusing on intersections among narrative studies, cognitive science, and critical animal studies, his research and teaching also encompass storytelling across media, discourse analysis, and philosophical and linguistic approaches to literature. The founding editor of the journal Storyworlds, he serves as convenor of the new AWASH (Animal Worlds in the Arts, Sciences, and Humanities) Focus Group at Ohio State. His book Storytelling and the Sciences of Mind will be published by MIT Press in 2013. 

Neil Randall, University of Waterloo 
"The Lord of the Rings as Videogame: Challenges in Adaptation from Venerated Source to Anticipated Genre" (video)
Neil Randall is Associate Professor of English at the University of Waterloo and Director of the university's Games Institute. In 2012, he was awarded an SSHRC Parternship Grant to develop a games research network called IMMERSe (Interactive and Multi-Modal Research Syndicate). This project establishes a network of seven universities and six industry partners to conduct research into player experience and behavior, with studies focusing on player immersion, player presence, player relationships, and player addiction.  The project has received a total of $5.8 million in funding and reaches across disciplines to include scholars from the arts, social sciences, engineering, and computer science. 

 

Risa Applegarth, University of North Carolina at Greensboro 
Risa Applegarth, Assistant Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in writing, rhetorical history and theory, rhetoric of science, and American nature writing and autobiography.  Her research on genre, professionalization, and women's rhetorics has appeared in College Composition and Communication, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, and the collection Women and Rhetoric Between the Wars. Her current book project, Other Grounds: Gender, Genre, and Science in American Anthropology, examines the role of genre change in American anthropology’s early 20th century transformation from a "welcoming science," open to women and amateurs, into a rigorous science of culture.

Jonathan Buehl, The Ohio State University 
Jonathan Buehl is Assistant Professor of English and Director of Business and Technical Writing at Ohio State University, where he teaches technical writing, science writing, and research methods. His dissertation on visualization and scientific argument won the ATTW/CCCC Award for the Outstanding Dissertation in Technical Communication in 2009. With Alan Gross, he is currently co-editing Science and the Internet: Communicating Knowledge in a Digital Age (Baywood, forthcoming), a collection of essays examining how digital technologies are transforming scientific argumentation, peer review, and the circulation of scientific knowledge. He is a co-founder and co-chair of the CCCC Special Interest Group on Science and Writing. 

Johanna Hartelius, Northern Illinois University 
Johanna Hartelius (Ph. D. 2008, University of Texas Austin) is Assistant Professor in the rhetoric area of the Communication Department at Northern Illinois University. Her research focuses on the rhetoric of expertise, public memory, and digital rhetoric. She has published a book, The Rhetoric of Expertise (Lexington Books, 2011), and her scholarship appears in journals such as Argumentation and Advocacy, Critical Studies in Media Communication, Management Communication Quarterly, the Quarterly Journal of Speech, and Rhetoric Society Quarterly. Hartelius teaches rhetorical criticism, argumentation, free speech and communication ethics, and classical rhetoric.

 

Melanie Kill, University of Maryland
Melanie Kill is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her research is in digital rhetorics and rhetorical genre theory, with specific interests in the relationship between genre change and writing technologies, as well as social change and rhetorical innovation. Her work has appeared in College Composition and Communication, JAC, and the edited collection Teaching Digital Humanities (Open Book Publishers, 2012). Her current projects focus on Wikipedia's adaptation of the encyclopedic tradition and the development of a rhetorical theory of uptake in genre studies. She teaches courses in web authoring, genre theory, the digital public sphere, writing, and women's rhetorics. 

Ben McCorkle, The Ohio State University–Marion 
Ben McCorkle is Associate Professor of English at Ohio State University at Marion, where he teaches courses on composition, the history and theory of rhetoric, and digital media production. He is the author of Rhetorical Delivery as Technological Discourse: A Cross-Historical Study (Southern Illinois University Press, 2012). He has also published essays in various journals and edited collections, including Computers and Composition Online, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, and Composition Studies. 

 

Laurie McNeill, University of British Columbia 
Laurie McNeill is co-chair of the Coordinated Arts Program and an Instructor in the Department of English at the University of British Columbia. Her current research examines instances of digital life narratives, including blogs, social networking sites, and "auto/tweetographies," analyzing how these sites shape how individuals make meaning of experience through the interface of genre, technology, and culture. Her work on these subjects is published or forthcoming in Biography, Identity Technologies (Wisconsin UP), Genres in the Internet (John Benjamins), and Language and New Media (Hampton). She is also engaged in research on best practices in collaborative teaching and learning practices in cohort programs.