9th Annual
Naylor Workshop
for Undergraduate
Research
in Writing Studies

Mentors

As educators, we’re responsible for giving our students the intellectual tools they need to flourish in all their endeavors. This year, our committed mentors did this by pushing the undergraduate researchers towards specificity, originality, and social justice. They encouraged the students to think about new methodologies, different questions. In effect, they heeded this year’s research theme, helping students excel not by regulating students’ voices—as so many classrooms do—but by amplifying them.

Here are the mentors that affirmed students voices at this year’s workshop:

Whitney Jordan Adams

Whitney Jordan Adams earned her PhD in Rhetorics, Communication, and Information Design from Clemson University. At Clemson, Dr. Adams was the assistant director of the writing center and helped to create the Visual Information Design Center, where both students and faculty can go for assistance with visual presentations, visual rhetoric, and graphic design. Currently, she is the Visiting Assistant Professor of English, Rhetoric, and Writing at Berry College in Rome, GA. She studies the rhetorical construction of white supremacy, focusing on the Alt-Right, Accelerationism, and the rise in white nationalism. Additionally, she studies how symbols reproduce ideology connected to resentment rhetoric. Her courses focus on issues related to race, community activism, anti-racist pedagogy, and the rise in misinformation and the digital divide.

Maria Assif

I am Professor of English, Associate Chair of EDI, the Coordinator of our first-year writing course, and the Faculty Advisor of the Joint Program (B.A. in English/Master of Teaching) at the University of Toronto Scarborough. I am also the Co-Coordinator of The Writing About Writing Network (WAWN). My work for the past fifteen has been focusing on first-year writing and EDAI pedagogies (Equity, Diversity, Access, and Inclusivity). I mostly use discourse analysis and qualitative methods in my research. I speak four languages and identify home between Canada, the U.S.A and Morocco.

Rebecca Babcock

Currently I'm interested in the social nature of writing. How people interact with others in person, online, and through texts as they compose their writing and work through the writing process. I have been participating in and studying writing groups, writing workshops, writing retreats, etc, both in-person and online. I have several articles in the revise-and-resubmit stage on these topics, especially as relates to multi-level, interdisciplinary writing groups that may also be multi-lingual and even multi-national. I also taught a class recently on Linguistic Justice and as a group we presented at the Conference on College Composition and Communication on Latinx Linguistic Justice. We also have an article under submission and are working on an edited collection on the same topic.

Gabriel Cutrufello

I study the history of science and technical writing by using archives of student writing from the 1800s. I am interested in understanding the ways in which undergraduate and graduate students in the science and engineering integrated visual information (sketches of equipment, maps, tables, charts) into their writing during the early years of the modern American university model (roughly the 1850s to the early 1900s). Using large collections of student writing from the era helps me to see patterns and allows me to understand the larger national movement to integrate writing into the sciences and engineering in the late 1800s.

Dominic DelliCarpini

Dominic DelliCarpini is the Naylor Endowed Professor of Writing Studies and Dean of the Center for Community Engagement at York College of Pennsylvania, where he also served 13 years as WPA, five years as Chief Academic Officer, and as Academic Senate President. His articles, book chapters, and presentations focus upon writing as engaged citizenship and undergraduate research. He is also author/editor of four textbooks, and has owned two small businesses—a bakery/cafe and a retail clothing business—in his earlier days. His expertise includes work in human-centered design (Design Thinking).

Doug Downs

I research in two overall areas: 1) public conceptions of writing, research, and reading, in order to understand how such conceptions influence the way people learn and do those activities—meaning I research ways of teaching reading, writing, and research; and 2) ways of facilitating public deliberation (especially on science/tech subjects like sustainable energy, and on religious discourses and divides) that help opposing discourses hear one another and negotiate shared understandings. I do my research by interviewing and surveying students, teachers, and members of whatever discourses I’m studying, and conducting discourse analysis on collections of texts (such as news media reports). I am increasingly interested in research that doesn't get published in academic journals but instead is written for the communities of people it's trying to help.

Andrea Efthymiou

Andrea has been a writing center administrator since 2007, mentoring tutors' research on topics ranging from tutoring across genres, valuing students' languages, and understanding undergraduate tutor labor. In her own research, Andrea employs qualitative methods—like conducting interviews and collecting surveys—to build knowledge around writing center work and writing beyond the university. Recently, Andrea has presented and published on the impact undergraduate research experiences have on writing center tutors. She also is part of an ongoing, multi-institutional project that studies the function of self-sponsored writing in people's lives.

McKinley Green

McKinley Green (he/him/his) is an assistant professor of English at George Mason University. Broadly, his research draws from rhetorics of health and medicine, technical communication, and queer rhetorics. His current research uses qualitative methods to investigate how young people living with HIV define, communicate about, and mitigate the health risks that most impact their sexual health. His research illustrates how these narratives reveal alternative epistemologies of HIV risk and identify new frameworks for HIV care and prevention. Recently, McKinley’s research has been published in Technical Communication Quarterly, Rhetoric of Health and Medicine, Computers and Composition, and Reflections.

Cantice Greene

I'm interested in helping students examine the ways their identity fuels their research and academic, social, and civic interests. My writing and research explores women's identities, English language learners (Gen 1.5, bilingualism, codemeshing), faith (and specifically Christian faith) in the college classroom. I have used autoethnography, theory building, archival, and qualitative (survey, interview) research methods.

Daniel Hengel

I love teaching. I think of myself as a teacher-scholar rather than a researcher who teaches. My teaching and research interests center language as a space of both oppression and an opportunity to create forms of dissent. I called my most recent first-year writing course, "Language and Power." In school year 23/24, I plan on teaching (in addition to first-year writing), a class titled, "Radical Rhetorics: Persuasion, Power, and Protest." At MLA and NeMLA, I have presented on a range of topics centered on creative curriculum design, experiential education, the syllabus as hospitable practice, and community building in the classroom. My most recent publication, "Power Relations and Experiential Education: Facilitating Conscientization in the Humanities," appeared in Radical Teacher: a socialist, feminist, and anti-racist peer-reviewed academic journal dedicated to the theory and practice of education in Spring 2023. Most of my work seeks, in some way, to expose and challenge various forms of coercion and control that disenfranchise marginalized social bodies.

Emma Hetrick

My name is Emma Hetrick (she/her), and I'm the Writing Program Coordinator at Lafayette College. Although I have come to writing studies from a circuitous route, much of my scholarship and approach to working with students has been in identifying and working to dismantle barriers to access, as well as thinking about who is represented in academic spaces and what the implications of these representations are. In my position, I train and supervise undergraduate writing tutors and develop programs that support writing communities and equip campus community members with the tools necessary to address a variety of rhetorical situations.

Cody Hmelar

Through my work as an undergraduate researcher, I explored multi-modal education through immersive media and its impacts on retention rates and the writing process using qualitative methods. After graduating, I examined linguistic justice in Asian/Asian American diasporic communities through rhetorical analysis of governmental response to the COVID-19 pandemic as well as narrative play as a coping mechanism to the native speaker fallacy in the teaching and hiring in institutions of higher learning. I examine this through statistical analysis of hirings of non/tenure-track faculty and qualitative interviews with graduate students and doctoral candidates. I have presented at the Naylor Workshop, CCCC and will present at CWPA in July. Outside of composition and rhetoric, I work as a broadcast engineer in major market radio and television stations and teach basic engineering and broadcast networking courses at the undergraduate level. I also serve as associate chair of the Asian/Asian American Caucus at CCCC.

Gwendolynne Reid

I'm an associate professor of English and direct the Writing and Communication Program at Oxford College of Emory University. My research focuses on how disciplines, like scientific disciplines, use writing to produce and communicate new knowledge. I most often employ rhetorical genre theory and qualitative methods like text-based ethnography. My research, for example, has examined how scientists use digital media to engage citizens and how this impacts their scientific writing. Another recent project has examined citation practices in the medical journals JAMA and JNMA to examine how the history of racism in American medicine is reproduced in citational relationships and in digital tools like impact factors and search results. My students have published and presented on a range of topics, including rhetorical analyses of Oprah Winfrey's 2018 Golden Globes award acceptance speech and of the science documentary Our Secret Universe, and genre analyses of scholarly book prefaces, men's lifestyle magazine covers, and mental health recovery narratives.

Myra Tatum Salcedo

First and foremost, I began my career with a focus on social justice issues as a nationally award-winning civil rights reporter with Hearst Newspapers. Then, I earned my PhD in Rhetoric and Composition and have presented conference papers and publications on creating civil discourse amongst religions, ethnicities, gender, cultural identities, disabilities and more. My research is now excelling in the visual arts as being notable in the way of literacy in the realm of offering visual and textual works (largely as a healing mode) for those who engage various parts of the brain in deciphering comics and graphic novels. I have a chapter at the moment at press concerning comics and graphic novels being beneficial pre-and-post deployment on deciphering visual images and textual print combined. I am a highly narrative writer and believe heavily in utilizing RESEARCH that can lead the researcher to unique and new connections in order to add a voice that can change up the conversation in the scholarly realm of publications!

Mike Zerbe

My name is Mike Zerbe, and I teach at York College of Pennsylvania. I teach courses in first-year writing, technical and scientific communication, rhetorical history and theory, civic rhetoric and writing, linguistics, and editing and writing style. My background is mostly in scientific and medical writing: I worked as an editor for a cancer research journal for a few years, and my undergraduate degree is in chemistry (with graduate degrees in English). I'm also a big fan of all things global, and I've had the good fortune to teach in Bulgaria (in Eastern Europe) and India. I also spend a lot of time in Peru, where my wife is from.