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.
Jathan Day
Jathan’s research interests include digital literacies, online pedagogy, and disability studies. He is currently researching teachers’ and students’ perceptions of online participation in course management systems.
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.
James Watson Hammond
James Hammond’s research centers on the social and intellectual histories of writing assessment, and on educational measurement history and theory.
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.
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.
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.
Naitnaphit Limlamai
Naitnaphit Limlamai studies secondary English methods courses and their instructors. Specifically, she studies how methods instructors conceptualize the discipline of English and the implications of that conceptualization on their courses.
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.
Andrew Moos
Andrew is interested in exploring the social nature of responding to student writing.
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.
Molly Parsons
Molly is interested in the potential for teaching civic discourse through writing instruction in classrooms and writing centers. In her dissertation, she is considering the possible role of conflict and controversy in writing center consultations.
Adrienne Raw
Adrienne’s research interests in fan and media studies are founded in a lifelong interest and involvement in fandom and fan culture. She is also interested in corpus linguistics, adaptation theory, digital media and literacy, and the pedagogical theories and practices of teacher training.
Kendon Smith
Kendon’s research interests include writing pedagogy, teacher education, and sociolinguistics. This involves exploring what teachers know and believe about language and the extent to which these beliefs and knowledge are reflected in teaching practices.
Michelle Sprouse
Michelle Sprouse is a third-year student in JPEE. Her current research focuses on social annotation as a tool for improving reading in first-year composition.
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.
Kathryn (Katie) Van Zanen
Katie’s research interests include writing as social action, teaching for citizenship, and constructing authority in the first year writing classroom. She teaches first-year writing in the university’s English Department Writing Program.
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.
Kelly Wheeler
Kelly’s research interests include composition and rhetoric with an emphasis in multimodality, new materialism, and visual rhetoric.
Emily Wilson
Growing up in the Air Force gave Emily the chance to live all over the United States and also gave her a desire to study literacy-based approaches for helping military-connected students thrive in the classroom.
Elizabeth (Adelay) Witherite
Adelay investigates how educators facilitate critical discussions of sociocultural issues.
Crystal Zanders
Crystal is interested in literacy studies and race-related rhetorical analysis.