While I retired in 2022, I am continuing to teach and publish on rhetoric, higher education, and coalitional leadership, particularly the challenging opportunities facing early-career faculty and staff.
Before retiring, I created social justice rhetorics classes for general-education students and upper-division majors in English. The assignment sequences and materials are included on the Rights Courses page.
In the decade that I served as vice provost for faculty affairs, I worked with faculty senate leaders to institute the career-track and continuing-status tracks for those working off the tenure track, and we also established an inclusive view of scholarship for tenure-track faculty. I also worked with staff and faculty to develop several series of leadership workshops for department heads, staff, and early and mid-career faculty. I have also co-facilitated half-day and full-day leadership workshops at the Conference on College Composition and Communication. Some materials from these workshops are included on the Next-Gen Leadership page.
Also on that page is the research on leadership and early-career faculy that I am doing. My published research on leadership includes the introduction to a special issue of College Eng,lsh that I coedited with Joddy Murray. I also published another College English piece on leadership, “The Challenging Opportunities Facing Next-Generation Faculty and Staff Leaders,” with Charles McMartin that was based on a national survey of recent-PhDs in writing studies that we did in 2021. A report on that survey is on the Next-Gen Leadership page along with the introduction and table of contents for an edited collection that we are working on with two other recent PhDs, Next-Gen Perspectives on Coalitional Leadership in Writing Studies: Stratelgies for Launching Careers, Building Networks and Challenging Systemic Inequities, which is forthcoming in an open-access series published by Utah State University Press.
I am also working on a book on the leadership challenges facing English departments and related liberal arts disciplines that builds on my two-volume study of the history of college English. The Formation of College English: Rhetoric and Belles Lettres in the British Cultural Provinces received a national award from the Modern Languages Association, and recent developments in literacy and the literate are examined in The Evolution of College English: Literacy Studies from the Puritans to the Postmoderns.
For those who interested enough to have read this far, I will note that I have received university-wide awards for my own leadership, my work mentoring graduate students, my advocacy for women faculty and staff, and my support for shared governance against the managerialism that is currently transforming institutions of public learning into business enterprises.