The Ph.D Program in Composition and
Rhetoric is committed to providing outstanding graduate education focused on issues and problems that matter in rhetoric, language, literacy, and learning in contemporary society. Here a nationally renowned faculty and staff work closely with a diverse group of graduate students on developing excellence in scholarship, undergraduate teaching, and professional activism. Founded in 1991, we are a stand-alone, multi-disciplinary program inside
a large, leading English Department and great university.

Please refer to the Prospective Student FAQ and/or contact the CompRhet program.

You can also download our brochure (.pdf).

We've Moved!

You can now find us at the new English department website.

May 2008-2009 faculty-authored prelim questions

They will remain in effect through August 2011.

1) How can rhetoric and composition be understood as a material practice?
2) How is writing gendered?

You can find previous prelims questions here.

Congratulations to Rebecca Lorimer

Rebecca was recognized this week with the department's Early Career Teaching Award.

Congratulations to Adam Koehler

Adam (PhD 2008) has an essay in a recent collection, Radiohead and Philosophy: Fitter Happier More Deductive, from Open Court Press. The essay's titled "The Mutilation of Voice in Kid A (Or, My John Mayer Problem)."

Madison Area Writing Center Colloquium

Please join us for the next Madison Area Writing Center Colloquium, which promises to be a very special event:

"Adventures in Starting a Technical College Regional Campus Writing Center--From Scratch!"

Sarah Johnson, Director of Madison Area Technical College's (MATC) Writing Center
Andrea Benton, MATC Writing Center's Regional Coordinator

Monday, April 27, 2009, 6:00-7:30 PM
MATC in **Fort Atkinson** (not in Madison)
827 Banker Road, Fort Atkinson

Sarah Johnson and Andrea Benton will talk about their experience getting a Writing Center up and running at MATC's Fort Atkinson campus.

Comp-Rhet Reading Group

At reading group this Wednesday, April 22, we will discuss chapter 2,"Classical Rhetoric Conceptualized, or Vocal men and Muted Women," of Cheryl Glenn's Rhetoric Retold: Regendering the Tradition from Antiquity through the Renaissance.

We'll meet in the Comp/Rhet resource room this Wednesday at 10am. See you then!

Congratulations to Eric Pritchard

Eric has been awarded a Scholar-in-Residence Fellowship at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York City for 2009-2010. The fellowship is in support of archival research in connection with a book in progress, Black Queer Literacies, which is based on the dissertation Eric completed here last year.

The Schomburg houses papers of the National Coalition of Black Lesbians and Gays, the Other Countries Collective, as well as the papers of black gay writer Melvin Dixon and activists Ronald Simmons and Asotto Saint, among others.

Eric is an assistant professor of Rhetoric and Writing Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.

Congratulations to Brad Hughes and Emily Hall

The 2008 special issue of the WAC journal Across the Disciplines, which Brad Hughes and Emily Hall were invited guest editors for, was honored at the recent CCCC for receiving several nominations for best scholarship by the International Writing Centers Association.

That issue, titled Rewriting Across the Curriculum: Writing Fellows as Agents of Change in WAC, featured new research about the intersection of WAC and Writing Fellows. Here's a link to that issue. Check it out.

Congratulations to Comp/Rhet Job Hunters

Matthew Capdevielle will be joining the Notre Dame faculty as Director of the University Writing Center, starting in the fall.

Rasha Diab has accepted a position as assistant professor in the Department of Rhetoric and Writing at the University of Texas at Austin. In addition to continuing her research on rhetorics of peacemaking, Rasha will teach courses in intercultural rhetorical studies.

Ralph Cintron at final Comp/Rhet Colloquium

Please join us for the final Comp/Rhet Colloquium of the semester, where Dr. Ralph Cintron from the University of Illinois at Chicago will deliver a talk entitled "Minutemen and The Subject of Democracy."

Friday, May 1
1:00-3:00 p.m.
6191 HCW

Congratualtions to Kate Vieira!

We're happy to announce that Kate Vieira, one of our Comp/Rhet PhD students has just received an L & S Teaching Fellow Award.

Madison Area Writing Center Colloquium

"Innovation and Repetition: The Brooklyn Plan and Writing Centers"

A Videoconference with . . .

Harvey Kail, Professor of English and Director of the Writing Center
University of Maine

Thursday, April 9, 2009, 5:30-7:00pm
The Pyle Center, Room 235
702 Langdon St.

In this colloquium, we will discuss the Fall 2008 special issue of The Writing Center Journal (28.2), "Kenneth Bruffee and the Brooklyn Plan," as a window through which to look at some of the issues that continue to animate writing center conversation: the authority of knowledge and the idea of the writing center in the academy, training (or "educating") tutors, issues in collaborative learning and the educational, social, and political spaces writing centers occupy.

Comp/Rhet Reading Group

This week we are reading the first chapter from Wayne Booth's Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent - the pdf is attached. This first section sets up what Booth sees as the "Five Kinds of Modern Dogma" and problems with motivism in modernist thinking.

We'll have one last meeting on April 22nd and the selection will also be from the core list - Rhetoric Retold: Regendering the Tradition by Cheryl Glenn.

Wednesday, April 8
10:00 a.m.
Comp/Rhet Resource Room.

UW Teaching Academy Future Faculty Partner's selected

Dave Stock and Cydney Alexis have been named Future Faculty Partners in the UW Teaching Academy. "The purpose of the Future Faculty Partner affiliation is to encourage a commitment to teaching in the next generation of college and university educators."

Julie Nelson Christoph Awarded Fulbright Fellowship

Alum Julie Nelson Christoph of the University of Puget Sound has been awarded a Fulbright Fellowship. She will spend next year in Tanzania, where she will continue her research on adult literacy programs, lecture at the State University of Zanzibar, and work with faculty there who are developing writing courses and establishing a writing center. (English is the language of instruction.) Higher education in Tanzania is in the midst of great growth and change.

Congratulations to Julie for helping to grow comp/rhet into an international field of study.

Anne Wysocki visits the UW-Madison Friday

Anne Wysocki will be giving a talk called “Productive Ends,” as part of the Rhetoric and Composition Colloquium. Wysocki is Associate Professor of English and New Media at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Wysocki’s work includes Compose/Design/ Advocate:A Rhetoric for Integrating the Written, Visual, and Oral and Writing New Media: Theory and Applications for Expanding the Teaching of Composition.

Friday, March 27th
3:00pm
6191 Helen C. White Hall

Comp/Rhet Reading Group

At reading group this Wednesday, March 23 , we will discuss This week's core list reading is from James Berlin's Rhetorics, Poetics, and Cultures, chapters 3-5.

The group will meet in the Comp/Rhet resource room at 10am.

Morris Young Nominated for CCCC Assistant Chair

Congratulations to Morris Young who has been chosen by the CCCC Nominating Committee to stand for election as CCCC Assistant Chair. If elected, Morris would be program chair for the national conference, on his way to becoming chair of the entire organization. What an honor for Morris and an exciting prospect for our program.

All vigilant Badgers will have an especially good reason to vote in the upcoming CCCC elections. Watch for your ballots in the mail!

UW Speakers at the Upcoming Expanding Literacy Studies Conference

Maria Bibbs will be one of the keynote speakers with Harvey Graff. Rebecca Lorimer and Rush Daniel are also presenters.

Maria Bibbs will explore the origins of the African American Literacy Myth. Her presentation will narrate the struggles that produced a literacy ideology particular to the historical and social experience of African Americans, which is heavily informed by the institution and memory of slavery. This ideology is interested in the question of whether black people will be trapped in a subordinate position in American society and if literacy plays a role in determining the answer to those questions. She will discuss her use of a race-centered, historical approach focusing on writing and publications that allows her to reconstruct the ideological context around black literacy during the Progressive Era.

Rebecca Lorimer will present on "Women Writing in Global Literacy Stations." This presentation explores the movement of literacy through an increasingly global circulation of people, work,and language. The presentation proposes a literacy framework that takes into account multiple sites (global stations) and suggests that the movement between these stations is, for writers, powerful and generative.

Rush Daniel will present on "Docile Bodies, Literate Minds: Ideology and Obedience Through Literacy." This paper discusses the potential for the production of “docile bodies,” or willing subjects through the teaching of literacy. The speaker adopts a Foucauldian framework, interrogating the potential of the teaching of literacy to be synonymous with the teaching of appropriate behavior.

More on this interesting graduate student conference is available here.

UW Comp/Rhet @ the CCCC

Several Comp/Rhet faculty, students, and alum are presenting in San Francisco next week. For a full list and pdf version, please follow this link.

Comp/Rhet Reading Group

At reading group this Wednesday, March 4, we will discuss Julie Nelson Christoph's, “Each One Teach One: The Legacy of Evangelism in Adult Literacy Education,” Written Communication, Vol. 26, No.1, January 2009.

The group will meet in the Comp/Rhet resource room at 10am.

Institute for Research in the Humanities Seminar featuring Michael Bernard-Donals

'Conflations of Memory at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum'

February 23, Monday
Room 204 Bradley Memorial
1225 Linden Drive (across from Van Hise Parking Garage entrance)
3:00-5:00 p.m.
(refreshments at 3:00; presentation at 3:30)

Abstract: The US Holocaust Memorial Council and the designers of the US Holocaust Museum attempted to ensure, through the museum's design, that visitors would remember the Holocaust as a specific historical event. But what visitors learn, and see, and remember at the USHMM is often enough an event or clusters of events that are at best only tangentially related to the Holocaust. The seminar, part of a project which tries to explain how and why such a conflation of memories occurs, takes account of some of the earliest discussions about the shape of the museum and the contents of its permanent exhibit.

Next CompRhet Colloquium

The Composition and Rhetoric Colloquium is continuing the honorable tradition of sponsoring a CCCC dress rehearsal on the following dates:

Wednesday, March 4, from 3:00-5:00 p.m. in 7191
Thursday, March 5, from 12:00-2:00 p.m. in 7191

We invite all who are presenting in San Francisco to participate by presenting your work to your peers and faculty. This is your opportunity to finish your paper on time and to get feedback from an extremely astute audience. Please sign up by Feb. 28.

Comp-Rhet Reading Group Meeting

The reading for this Wednesday, February 18th, from Philosophy and Rhetoric, "Modernity as a Rhetorical Problem: Phronesis, Forms, and Forums in Norms of Rhetorical Culture" by James Arnt Aune, is attached. The article looks at how Farrell's book treats Aristotelian rhetoric and seeks to build on its concepts, particularly regarding phronesis in modern culture.

Meeting in the Resource Room.

Madison Area Writing Center Colloquium

"Writing Fellows/Faculty Collaborations: Translation and Transformation"

Emily Hall
Director of the Undergraduate Writing Fellows Program
University of Wisconsin-Madison

Thursday, February 26, 2009, 4:00-5:30 PM
Room 6176 of the Writing Center, Helen C. White Hall

This talk will explore what happens when undergraduate Writing Fellows collaborate closely with faculty to improve student writing—how faculty-Fellow interactions facilitate translations across traditional institutional roles, enabling both groups to more fully understand the perspective of the other and open up new pedagogical spaces for the teaching of writing within and between disciplines.

New Book by Professor Michael Bernard-Donals Released

Mike's most recent book, Forgetful Memory: Representation and Remembrance in the Wake of the Holocaust, was released this January by State University of New York Press.

"Much of the discussion surrounding the Holocaust and how it can be depicted sixty years later has focused on memory. In Forgetful Memory, Michael Bernard-Donals focuses on the relation between memory and forgetfulness, arguing that memory and forgetfulness cannot be separated but must be examined as they complicate our understanding of the Shoah. Drawing on the work of Josef Yerushalmi, Maurice Blanchot, David Roskies, and especially Emmanuel Levinas, Bernard-Donals explores contemporary representations of the Holocaust in memoirs, novels, and poetry; films and photographs; in museums; and in our contemporary political discourse concerning the Middle East. Ultimately, Forgetful Memory makes the case that we should give up on the idea of memory as a kind of representation, and that we should see it instead as an intersection of remembrance and oblivion, as a kind of writing, where what remains at its margins--what is left unwritten--is at least as important as what is given voice."

Alumnus John Duffy has been awarded this year's CCCC Outstanding Book Award

John won the award for his book Writing From These Roots: Literacy in a Hmong-American Community. The study is based in Wisconsin and began as his dissertation.

This is what the committee said about John's work:

"It richly conceptualizes the study of literacy by considering its historical, personal, institutional, cultural, and transnational dimensions. This is a fascinating account that takes us across continents, across decades of recent history. The dimensions of literacy brought forward in this volume are beneath the surface of all of our students’ literate acts and ought to be the subject of our study and our pedagogy."

John will be presented with the award at the Awards Session of the 2009 CCCC Convention in San Francisco. The session is scheduled for Friday, March 13, 2009 from 5 - 6:30 pm.

Congratulations to Maria Bibbs

Maria has won a Vollrath Dissertation Fellowship. Maria is at work on a dissertation entitled "The African American Literacy Myth: Literacy's Racial and Ethical Objective During the Progressive Era and Beyond." Way to go, Maria!

Caring Adults Needed For Hundreds of Students Awaiting Academic Help!

Urban League of Greater Madison takes up call to action as Obama makes service and citizenship “cause of his presidency.”

Members of the community are needed as tutors for hundreds of student of all ages, from elementary to high school. A free orientation and training is scheduled Tuesday, February 3 at James C. Wright Middle School, 1717 Fish Hatchery Road in Madison.

The call for volunteers comes from the Schools of Hope Project partners including the Urban League of Greater Madison, Madison School District, RSVP of Dane County, and United Way of Dane County. Schools of Hope is a proven, one-on-one or one-on-two tutoring model that uses trained academic tutors. It is one of several strategies being used to address the racial achievement gap in Madison, Sun Prairie, Oregon, and Verona school districts.

No special education or experience is necessary to become a tutor - just a willingness to help about one hour per week.”

The Urban League asks that community members heed the call that President Obama has put forth... “We need your service, right now, in this moment - our moment - in history. I'm not going to tell you what your role should be; that's for you to discover. But I am going to ask you to play your part; ask you to stand up; ask you to put your foot firmly into the current of history.”

A free orientation and training is scheduled Tuesday, February 3 at James C. Wright Middle School, 1717 Fish Hatchery Road in Madison. Registration begins at 4:30 PM with workshops running between 5:00 PM and 7:00 PM. Advance registration is preferred, but not required. Training is open to those who are current tutors and those who are considering becoming tutors. Workshop topics include Middle School Math, Middle School Reading and Writing, High School Math, Basics of K-3 Literacy, Advanced Literacy Strategies, and Literacy Strategies for Elementary ESL Students. Call 608-251-8550 or email volunteer@ulgm.org to pre-register or if you are interested but unable to attend the February 3 training. See our website at www.ulgm.org for more information..

Scot Barnett wins Innovation in Teaching Award

Congrats to Scot Barnett who is one of five winners of the campus-wide UW Innovation in Teaching Award (a first for the English Department). He will be formally recognized at a ceremony in February.

Comp-Rhet RSA Institute Workshop Participants

Kim Moreland has been accepted to participate in the RSA Institute on History Matters: Materials and Methods for Scholarship in the History of Rhetoric.

Chrissy Stephenson has been selected to participate in another great RSA workshop -- Voices of Democracy: The U.S. Oratory Project.

Rebecca Lorimer will be our third doctoral participant in the RSA Summer Workshops. Her focus: Toward a Rhetoric of Multilingual Writing.

Workshops will be held at Penn State next June, and Kim, Chrissy, and Rebecca were selected from a record number of applicants. Congratulations, to all!

First Madison Area Writing Center Colloquium of the Spring 2009 Semester

"It Doesn't Happen by Accident: Designing and Leading the 2008 IWCA Summer Institute at UW-Madison"

Featuring Informal Presentations by and Discussion with--

Lisa Ede, Oregon State University
Paula Gillespie, Marquette University
Terry Maggio, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Brad Hughes, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Wednesday, February 4, 5:30-7:00 PM
The Pyle Center
702 Langdon Street
UW-Madison

(Lisa Ede will join us by videoconference.)

Comp-Rhet Reading Group Series for Spring 2009 Announced

The group will meet Wednesdays, at 10:00, in the Comp/Rhet Resource Room.

The first meeting is on February 4th: Theresa Lillis, "Ethnography as Method, Methodology, and 'Deep Theorizing': Closing the Gap Between Text and Context in Academic Writing Research,” Written Communication, Vol. 25, No.3, July 2008.

You can find the Spring '09 schedule here.

Eric Pritchard essay now on CCCC blog

Eric Pritchard (2008) is a recent alum of our program and has recently contributed a short essay for the CCCC Blog series Conversations on Diversity: "Pathways to Diversity: Social Justice and the Multiplicity of Identities." Please feel free to leave a comment and support the CCCC blog.

2008-2009 Vilas Travel Grant Awards Announced

Several Comp-Rhet dissertators have been awarded Vilas Travel Grants for their conference and research travel during this academic year. Congratulations to all!

Cydney Alexis, CCCC paper: "'Why We Need Things': Writer, Objects, and Writing Environments."

Scot Barnett, CCCC paper: "Where Knowing Emerges: On Episteme and Writing Technologies."

Matthew Capdevielle, CCCC paper: “Stories and Same Old Stories: Rehearsing and Reiterating the Debates about the First-Year Composition Requirement.”

Rik Hunter, CCCC paper: “The Wiki-Way: Wiki-Mediated Constructions of Authorship and Patterns of Collaborative Composition.”

Tim Laquintano, research travel to Chicago for dissertation: "Writing an Economy of Instruction."

Christopher Syrnyk, CCCC paper: “Disarticulating the (Dis)Abled Subject: Locked-In Syndrome and the Voiceless Other.”

Annette Vee, CCCC paper: "The Extracurriculum of "Proceduracy": Learning Computer Code Literacy in Online Communities"

Past Area News & Announcements

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