Current Students
Our students are the heart and soul of our program and our greatest strength. Dedicated scholars and teachers and good departmental citizens, our students stand out for the professional support they offer each other. One of the highlights of our program is our weekly Chalk and Cheese lunch, an informal professional development seminar run by the third-year cohort for the benefit of the first- and second-year students.
Our students also work together on dissertation writing groups, and many are closely involved in campus and community groups. Explore the exciting work our students are doing or, to learn more about life in the program, contact our program ambassadors.
Anna Almore
Anna’s research interests are exploring the pedagogies required for teachers and students to heal from oppression.
Ashley Bradley
Ashley’s research focuses on the [mis]representation of people of color in the K-12 English classroom and the implications for students and American society.
Erin (monét) Cooper
monét’s focus is the strategies African-American and Latino girls develop and use in order to navigate their academic environment and the impact of teacher intra-racial bias on relationships with students and families.
Jathan Day
Jathan’s current research interests include course management systems, digital literacies, online pedagogy, disability studies, and reading practices. His dissertation examines how writing instructors’ pedagogies and design decisions in Canvas affect the way in which students engage with it through their writing and learning. Read more…
For Jathan’s personal website, click here.
Carlina Duan
Carlina is looking forward to exploring creative writing pedagogies, sociolinguistics, and applied linguistics.
Megan Garver
Megan’s background in the sciences and healthcare communication inspired her to join Michigan’s interdisciplinary E&E program and pursue research in writing in the sciences, scientific and medical rhetoric, and examining how to better support women in the sciences. Read more…
Jason Godfrey
Jason’s research focuses on how modality (re)forms both student and instructor literacies in college composition classrooms.
Michael Hoffman
Michael is looking forward to spending his time in the E&E program thinking about how peer response can help students not only with their writing skills, but also with social and emotional learning. Read more…
Sarah Hughes
Sarah’s research centers on narrative discourse: how the stories we tell reveal insight into ideology and how stories can activate audiences toward social action. Read more…
Christopher Kingsland
Christopher is interested in composition and writing studies, particularly, improving writing instruction and student writing outcomes in secondary classrooms through examination of writing identities and related instructional practices.
Rusi (Ruth) Li
Ruth Li’s interests include writing development, composition pedagogy, and digital literacies; her current project examines linguistic and metacognitive approaches to studying college students’ writing. Read more…
Naitnaphit Limlamai
Naitnaphit Limlamai studies how secondary English preservice teachers are trained and how they take up that training. She is specifically curious about teachers’ curricular and instructional choices, how teachers are trained to make them, and how they are made. Read more…
For her personal website.
Ryan McCarty
Ryan McCarty’s research focuses on the ways that translation impacts much of the learning that students do, from its effects on multilingual students, to its role in developing disciplinary knowledges and identities. Read more…
Checkout Ryan’s personal website or follow him on Twitter @RyanCMcCarty1.
Andrew Moos
Andrew is interested in exploring the social nature of responding to student writing. Read more…
Cassandra (Casey) Otemuyiwa
Casey is interested in teacher education and the linguistics of writing development in secondary English language arts and college composition classes. She has taught in the English Department Writing Program and in the School of Education’s teacher education program. Read more…
Adrienne Raw
Adrienne’s research interests in fan studies and digital cultures are founded in a lifelong interest and involvement in fandom and fan culture. She is also interested in multimodal composition, digital humanities, and the training of composition instructors for higher education. You can reach her on Twitter @AdrienneRaw and on her website at adrienneraw.com. Read more…
Kendon Smith
Kendon studies how notions of standard language are taken up in composition classrooms. His current research examines how textbooks discuss standard language and how these texts affect classroom interaction. Read more…
Kendon’s personal website can be found here.
Michelle Sprouse
Michelle Sprouse is a fourth-year student in JPEE. Her current research focuses on social annotation as a tool for improving reading in first-year composition. Read more…
Elizabeth Tacke
Elizabeth Tacke’s research is situated within life writing, disability studies, and rhetoric, and her dissertation project explores how women negotiate disclosures of disability and trauma. Read more…
Kathryn (Katie) Van Zanen
Katie’s research interest include writing as social action, education for civic values, and histories of writing instruction. She teaches first-year writing in the university’s English Department Writing Program. Follow Katie on Twitter@kvanzanen
Read more…
Kristin vanEyk
Kristin’s research with multidialectal and multilingual students collects and analyses how students talk about the roles their languages play in the writing classroom, and interrogates how notions of standardization affect these students’ composition experiences. Read more…
Kelly Wheeler
Kelly’s research interests include composition and rhetoric with an emphasis in multimodality, new materialism, and visual rhetoric. Read more…
Elizabeth (Adelay) Witherite
Adelay investigates how educators facilitate critical discussions of sociocultural issues. Read more…
Crystal Zanders
Crystal is interested in literacy studies and race-related rhetorical analysis. Read more…