Neil Baird, Bowling Green State University

Neil Baird is an associate professor of English at Bowling Green State University, where he is helping to create an upper-division writing requirement and to strengthen writing instruction in these courses through transfer-sensitive pedagogies. With Bradley Dilger, he completed a study of writing transfer in the major at a state comprehensive university, and articles on the metaphors WID faculty use to conceptualize transfer and on writing transfer in work-integrated contexts such as internships and science laboratories have appeared in WPA: Writing Program Administration, College Composition and Communication, and Across the Disciplines. As a participant in the ERS, he is primarily interested in Area 2. He would like to conduct surveys and follow up interviews to learn more about how alumni across institutions adapt prior knowledge, and to explore what this research means for engaging faculty across the university with practitioners in the field to improve writing instruction. 

Ann Blakeslee, Eastern Michigan University

Ann Blakeslee is Professor of Written Communication at Eastern Michigan University and Director of the Office of Campus and Community Writing, which houses the University Writing Center, Writing Across the Curriculum, Eastern Michigan Writing Project, the Disciplinary Literacies Initiative, and numerous other campus and community-based writing programs. Blakeslee has taught courses in writing studies, rhetoric, research methodologies, and technical and professional communication. She has authored two books and numerous articles and book chapters focused on writing in the disciplines, audience, research methods, ethics in research, writing in the sciences, workplace writing, and technical communication. She received the Society for Technical Communication Ken Rainey Award for Excellence in Research in Technical Communication and the Association of Teachers of Technical Writing Fellows Award. Blakeslee served on the executive committee of ATTW for 20 years and recently was elected to the executive committee of the new Association for Writing Across the Curriculum.  

Stuart Blythe, Michigan State University 

Stuart Blythe is an associate professor in the department of Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures at Michigan State University. His research has been focused on three areas: professional and technical writing, writing pedagogy and transfer, and interactions between “experts” and other publics such as community environmental groups and first responders. Stuart participated in the 2011-2013 Elon University Research Seminar on Critical Transitions: Writing and the Question of Transfer.  

Michael-John DePalma, Baylor University

Michael-John DePalma is an Associate Professor of English and the Coordinator of Professional Writing and Rhetoric at Baylor University. His scholarship on adaptivetransfer (with Jeff Ringer) seeks to understand the ways writers apply and reshape their prior writing knowledge and experiences as they negotiate new and potentially unfamiliar rhetorical tasks in university contexts. Specifically, his research investigates how L1 and L2 writers’ prior writing knowledge and experience facilitates transfer among writing genres and media within academic settings. As part of Elon’s CEL Research Seminar, he is interested in studying how writers mobilize and reshape their academic writing knowledge and experiences as they transition from writing majors to internship and undergraduate research contexts. His work on adaptive transfer has appeared in College Composition and CommunicationComputers and Composition, the Journal of Second Language WritingSystem, and several edited collections. With Jeff Ringer, he edited Mapping Christian Rhetorics(Routledge 2015). 

Ryan Dippre, University of Maine

Ryan Dippre is an Assistant Professor of English and the Director of College Composition at the University of Maine. His research interests include writing through the lifespan and writing program administration. He is the co-chair of the Writing through the Lifespan Collaboration, and chair of the Writing through the Lifespan Special Interest Group at CCCC. He is currently co-editing a collection, Approaches to Lifespan Writing Research: Steps Toward an Actionable Coherence with Talinn Phillips. He lives with his wife and son in Bangor, Maine. 


Dana Driscoll, Indiana University of Pennsylvania

Dr. Dana Lynn Driscoll is an Associate Professor of English at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, where she teaches in the interdisciplinary Ph.D. program Composition and Applied Linguistics. At IUP, she teaches graduate courses in writing pedagogy, research methods, professional academic writing, and writing centers and writing program administration. For over a decade, Dana has been exploring writing development and learning transfer, and is particularly interested in how internal characteristics tied to individual learners (dispositions, metacognition, previous experiences, etc.) influence and are shaped by educational, social, and professional contexts over time. As part of this work, she is engaged in a longitudinal study of writers currently in its 9th year of data collection. She has published and presented widely on issues of writing transfer, research methods, and writing centers, including offering keynote addresses at the 2018 East Central Writing Center Association and Middle East North Africa Writing Center Association in 2016.   

Sam Lucie Dvorakova, University of Edinburgh (Scotland)

Sam L. Dvorakova (Msc, University of Edinburgh) is a first year PhD Student at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. Her dissertation focuses on the effect of students as partners initiatives on the development of graduate attributes of science students. Beyond students as partners, Sam’s research interests also include the development of identity and metacognition in students and the effect of these two areas on graduates’ writing experiences and capacity. 


Michelle Eady, University of Wollongong (Australia)

Dr. Michelle Eady is a senior lecturer in Curriculum and Pedagogy in the School of Education at the University of Wollongong, New South Wales, Australia. She is a HERDSA fellow, a senior fellow of the HEA and holds a national teaching citation for her work in quality teacher preparation. Her research interests include SOTL, Distance Learning/Synchronous Technology, Aboriginal Studies, Work Integrated Learning (WIL) and other current issues in Education. A central part of her work is to help students understand how to use their academic writing skills in reflection of WIL activities, connecting their experience with the expectations of the workplace and the theoretical frameworks that they are learning. Dr. Eady has had the pleasure of speaking at conferences worldwide and looks forward to collaborations with colleagues who have a passion for teaching and learning. 

Andrea Efthymiou, Hofstra University

Andrea Rosso Efthymiou is an Assistant Professor and Writing Center Director at Hofstra University. Andrea’s work on institutional mission in writing program administration and tutors’ discursive practiceshas appeared in various edited collections. Andrea’s research interests include sustainable mentorship of undergraduate research through tutor education and facilitating undergraduate students’ civic engagement. She is currently developing a longitudinal assessment plan to measure the impact of writing center tutors’ extended work beyond sessions, looking namely at tutors’ writing center research, conference presentations, and publications as reflective of undergraduate research. 

Alison Farrell, Maynooth University (Ireland)

Alison Farrell is Teaching Development Officer in the Centre for Teaching and Learning, School of Education, Maynooth University (Ireland) where she established the University’s Writing Centre in 2011. She has been directly involved in Education since 1994. She is a founding member and current co-chair of the Irish Network for the Enhancement of Writing (INEW).  In 2014 she initiated the first national Summer Writing Institute For Teachers (SWIFT). Currently, she is Principal Investigator and Chair of the European COST Action WeReLaTe which is exploring frontier taxonomies and institutional synergies across writing, research, learning and teaching. From January 2019 she will take up a position with the National Forum for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education as Senior Lead for Sectoral Engagement. Her research interests include academic writing, collaboration, professional development, and institutional policy and power in higher education. She holds a PhD in English. 

Lisa A. Giacumo, Boise State University 

Lisa A. Giacumo is an assistant professor of Organizational Performance and Workplace Learning at Boise State University. Her research and teaching interests include mentoring systems in organizations, design to support global and cross-cultural workplace learning needs, the use of technology for workplace learning and performance improvement, and the preparation of instructional designers. She has worked internationally as an instructional designer, trainer, and manager for businesses, universities, non-profits, and NGOs.  

Alexis Hart, Allegheny College

Alexis Hart (PhD, University of Georgia) is an Associate Professor of English and the Director of Writing at Allegheny College. Hart’s primary research interest lies at the intersection of veteran studies and writing studies. She was the co-recipient, with Roger Thompson, of a Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) Research Grant to study veterans returning to college writing classrooms; Hart and Thompson’s College Composition and Communication article based on this research earned the 2017 Richard Braddock Memorial Award. Hart’s research also appears in Composition ForumPedagogyWriting on the EdgeKairos, and the Community Literacy Journal, as well as several edited collections. Hart serves on the boards of several scholarly journals, including the Journal of Veterans StudiesKairos, the International Journal of ePortfolioCollege Composition and Communication, and The Peer Review

Ashley J. Holmes, Georgia State University

Ashley J. Holmes is Associate Professor of English and Director of Writing Across the Curriculum at Georgia State University (GSU) in Atlanta. Her book Public Pedagogy in Composition Studies—a comparative, cross-institutional study of how writing programs and instructors “go public” with pedagogy—was published with the Conference on College Composition and Communication’s Studies in Writing and Rhetoric series in 2016. Dr. Holmes’s scholarship on community writing, service-learning, and composition pedagogy has appeared in Community Literacy JournalReflections, and English Journal, and she has chapters in the edited collections Mobile Technology and the Writing Classroom and Overcoming Writers’ Block: Retention, Persistence, and Writing Programs. She was recently awarded the inaugural Signature Experience Teaching Award at GSU for her work with experiential, place-based, and service-learning pedagogies.  

Radhika Jaidev, Singapore Institute of Technology (Singapore)

Assistant Professor Dr. Radhika Jaidev has taught academic, technical and professional writing to undergraduate and graduate students for over three decades. In that time she has published journal articles and book chapters on embedding communication skills teaching in content subjects, curriculum design and review of a graduate writing course, etc. Her most recent publication would be a book chapter for Friberg, J. C. & McKinney, K. (in press). Applying the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning beyond One Classroom. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. She has been an invited speaker on language and communication skills pedagogy in higher education and learner motivation at regional conferences in Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines- the most recent one being the Malaysian Association of Applied Linguistics International Conference (MAALIC 2018) in December 2018. Currently, she teaches communication skills at the Singapore Institute of Technology in Singapore. She is also a member of SoTL-Asia. 

Alena Kasparkova, VSB-Technical University of Ostrava (Czech Republic)

Alena Kasparkova works at the Technical University of Ostrava in the Czech Republic. She is a researcher, publication coach, and she is trying to set up a writing center at her university through teaching courses of academic writing, cooperation with the library and the Academy of Sciences through a joint grant “Publish and Flourish: Publication Activity Support for PhD Students and their Supervisors”. She would like to prepare graduates better for writing in general. In a country with no tradition of teaching academic writing, she feels that starting with writing for publication will help to persuade policy-makers that teaching writing is highly useful and has many positive side-effects. Once established in one context, it will be easier to transfer teaching writing into another context. She is interested in “Exploring writing and writers’ experiences, prior knowledge, and writerly capacity”, particularly the question “What writing are alumni encountering beyond the university?”  

Anna V. Knutson, Duquesne University

Anna V. Knutson serves as Assistant Professor of English and Director of First-Year Writing at Duquesne University. She has collaboratively authored articles published in Across the DisciplinesCollege English, Kairos, and WPA: Writing Program Administration. With her co-authors, she won the 2016 Computers and Composition Ellen Nold Award for “Sites of Multimodal Literacy: Comparing Student Learning in Online and Face-to-Face Environments,” published in Computers and Composition. Interested in writing program administration, learning transfer, and digital literacies, Anna is currently exploring writing knowledge transfer between social media and academic contexts among intersectional feminist college students. In light of her interest in transfer between academic and non-academic domains coupled with findings in her current research about transfer between extracurricular and professional writing contexts, Anna is interested in exploring whether/how writers make connections between their online writing and their professional writing as they move into workplace environments. 

Heather Lindenman, Elon University 

Heather Lindenman is an assistant professor of English at Elon University, where she teaches first-year and community-engaged writing courses. Her research on service-learning, writing transfer across contexts, and students’ revision practices has been published in Composition ForumCollege Composition and CommunicationReflections, and the Community Literacy Journal. For the seminar, she is interested in research related to the writing that college graduates compose for professional and civic purposes. In particular, she is interested in studying the writing that alumni compose for their jobs and for civic engagement, and in considering how they develop and revise that writing. She would also be interested in investigating how graduates receive and process the feedback that they receive on their writing beyond the university and/or how young alumni use writing to address issues of importance to their communities.  

Stephen Macharia, Strathmore University (Kenya)

Stephen Macharia is a doctoral fellow, teaching Communication at Strathmore University in Kenya. He also works at Strathmore University Writing Centre where he is involved in coaching students in writing and speaking to equip them with skills and knowledge on effective communication in college and beyond. Inspired by the burgeoning trend of shifting workplace or business communication to online spaces, he has developed an interest in studying writing done within online platforms. He is specifically interested in studying the style and content of writing at the workplace in relation to the skills taught in undergraduate studies with a view to bridging the gap between practice in the industry and academia.    

Ina Alexandra Machura, Justus Liebig University Giessen (Germany)

Ina Alexandra Machura is a lecturer and research assistant at the English Department and the Writing Center of Justus Liebig University Giessen, Germany. She teaches discipline-specific courses in English Linguistics for undergraduate students as well as interdisciplinary writing-intensive courses for graduate and doctoral students in the social and life sciences, cooperating with lecturers from various departments in team-teaching partnerships. In her courses, she uses a translanguaging teaching approach to help students resort to their entire idiolects in order to optimize their English as a foreign language (EFL) writing processes. In her PhD project, she investigates undergraduate and graduate students’ multilingual writing skills development. She is primarily interested in the relationships between translation & transfer skills and multilingual writing skills.  

Jenn Mallette, Boise State University

Jenn Mallette is an assistant professor of English at Boise State University. In addition to teaching technical communication courses, she collaborates with faculty in the College of Engineering to support student writers. Her research interests build on those collaborations, examining best practices for integrating writing into engineering curriculum to help students develop writing knowledge that will transfer beyond the university into industry positions or graduate school. As part of this research, she also explores women’s experiences in engineering settings through the context of writing, developing approaches that will enable women to have more positive experiences with collaborative work and understanding how writing impacts their professional identities in the workplace. In this seminar, she hopes to develop ways to understand what students take with them into the workplace, including what practices, ideologies, and attitudes are replicated in school and beyond. 

Lilian Mina, University of South Florida

Lilian Mina is an Assistant Professor and Director of Composition at the University of South Florida. For “Writing Beyond the University” research seminar, she is interested in exploring whether our new curriculum that builds on both teaching-for-transfer (TFT) and multimodal composing can facilitate transfer of writing (broadly defined to include alphabetic and multimodal texts) knowledge and practices to writing outside the academic classroom: employment while in school, community service and volunteer work, student club and recreational activities. Using a mixed-method study design, she hopes to investigate “backward-reaching transfer” as students exit FYC classes to encounter novel writing situations in their professional and civic life. By asking students about their prior classroom composing experiences, it helps them to mentally recall these experiences, build bridges between the seemingly distinct writing contexts, and thus facilitate transfer of writing beyond the academic classroom. Participation in the seminar will also allow her to bring her professional and scholarly identities and interests to intersect and inform each other. 

Rebecca Nowacek, Marquette University 

Rebecca Nowacek is an associate professor of English at Marquette University, where she directs the Ott Memorial Writing Center. She is the author of Agents of Integration: Understanding Transfer as a Rhetorical Act, and her work has also appeared in CCC, College English, and RTE.  Her chapter in Naming What We Know, co-authored with Brad Hughes, received the IWCA Outstanding Article award. Rebecca was a Carnegie Scholar with the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, and the 2012 recipient of Marquette’s Gettel Faculty Award for Teaching Excellence.  



 Íde O’Sullivan, University of Limerick (Ireland)

Íde O’Sullivan (PhD, SFSEDA) is a Senior Educational Developer in the Centre for Teaching and Learning at the University of Limerick. Íde is Co-director of the Regional Writing Centre and Course Director for the Graduate Diploma/MA in Teaching, Learning and Scholarship. Since 2007, she has led the design, delivery and evaluation of writing-support interventions at UL for faculty and students, which aim to build writers’ capacity for writing in and beyond the university. Íde also works closely with academic staff on the development of their professional writing for publication and on the scholarship of teaching and learning.  

Matthew Pavesich, Georgetown University

Matthew Pavesich is Associate Teaching Professor of English and Associate Director of the University Writing Program at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. His research emerges from the intersections of rhetorical ecologies, postpedagogy, design, and the public humanities, often focusing on questions of writers’ self-agency, networked learning, and public encounter. His work appears in enculturation (forthcoming), The Journal of Basic WritingTechnoculture, and The WAC Journal, as well as in the DC/Adapters project at dcadapters.org.

Jennifer K. Reid, Marquette University

Jennifer K. Reid received her Ph.D. in Educational Policy and Leadership with an emphasis in higher education and writing studies from Marquette University. She currently works at Marquette as Director of Student Affairs Assessment, Communication and Student Government and also teaches Rhetoric and Composition part time. Her dissertation, Writing to Learn in a Mutt Course: How Writing Functions in a Social Justice Living Learning Community Seminar, examined how writing in a non-traditional classroom context facilitated students’ understanding of privilege and oppression and development toward becoming change agents. Jennifer’s research interests include writing-related knowledge transfer, writing across and beyond the curriculum, and college student development and success. 

Michael Rifenburg, University of North Georgia

Michael Rifenburg, associate professor of English at the University of North Georgia, USA, serves as director of First-Year Composition and Senior Faculty Fellow for Scholarly Writing with UNG’s Center for Teaching, Learning, and Leadership. He authored The Embodied Playbook: Writing Practices of Student-Athletes (Utah State University Press, 2018) and co-edited Contemporary Perspectives on Cognition and Writing (WAC Clearinghouse, 2017). His next book, Drilled to Write: A Longitudinal Study of a Cadet at a Senior Military College, is currently under contract. 



Liane Robertson, University of South Florida

Liane Robertson is Associate Professor and Director of First-Year Composition at the University of South Florida. Her current research is situated within a multi-institutional effort exploring the implications of a transfer-based curriculum, and focuses specifically on students’ capacity for transfer from an upper-division writing course to contexts within and beyond the academic. She is co-author of Writing Across Contexts: Transfer, Composition, and Sites of Writing (2014), winner of the CCCC 2015 Research Impact Award, and the Council of Writing Program Administrators 2014 Best Book Award. Her recent work appears in Composition, Rhetoric, and Disciplinarity (2018); Understanding Writing Transfer: Implications for Transformative Student Learning in Higher Education (2017); Critical Transitions: Writing and the Question of Transfer (2016); and A Rhetoric of Reflection (2016).  

Yogesh Sinha, Sohar University (Oman)

Dr. Yogesh Sinha has more than two decades of teaching experience. He has been teaching at Sohar University, Oman for more than a decade now. He has taught as Professor and Associate/Assistant Professor in the English departments of universities in Oman, Yemen, Ethiopia and India. Dr Yogesh is also the Past Co-Chair of Higher Education Interest Section, TESOL International Association, USA. He has supervised more than 25 research scholars’ PhD. & MPhil theses. He has a significant number of publications and has actively participated and presented papers in numerous TESOL Conventions and other international conferences in the USA, UK, Canada, Australia, Singapore, Greece, and elsewhere. He recently completed a funded research project on Post Enrolment Language Assessment (PELA) in Oman. His areas of research interest include Applied Linguistics, Literary Theory and Criticism, Communication Studies, TESOL, ELT and Quality Assurance. 

Amanda Sturgill, Elon University

Amanda Sturgill is an associate professor of communications at Elon University. She teaches students to write and edit in communications courses and to think through writing at levels ranging from first year to graduate students. In this seminar, she is particularly interested in how post-graduation, students think about shaping the world through their audience-focused communication.  Amanda is the author of Detecting Deception: Tools to Fight Fake News and the co-editor of Mind the Gap: Global Learning at Home and Abroad.

Kara Taczak, University of Denver 

Kara Taczak is a Teaching Associate Professor at the University of Denver where she also directs Faculty Development and ePortfolio Initiatives. Her research centers on teaching for transfer, and for the purposes of this seminar’s multi-institutional research, she hopes to build on her previous research to investigate how writers’ prior and current experiences, knowledges, and the like, including their writerly identity, expands outward. In other words, understanding more about students shift from writing for class to writing for Twitter to writing in a Bullet Journal to writing an email bulletin for work and so on. Taczak’s interests center on exploring how students understand themselves as “complete” writers not just writers for college courses, but also writers in social, personal, and professional contexts. 

Melissa Weresh, Drake University Law School

Melissa H. Weresh is a Dwight D. Opperman Distinguished Professor of Law at Drake University Law School. She received her B.A. from Wake Forest University and her J.D. from the University of Iowa College of Law. She is a past President of the Legal Writing Institute (LWI), a non-profit organization dedicated to improving legal writing. LWI has over 2,800 members and includes representatives from 38 different countries. Weresh is also actively involved in the Association of Legal Writing Directors and the Association of American Law Schools. She has authored numerous books and articles on legal writing pedagogy. Her research interests also include persuasion, ethics, and professionalism in legal communication.  She is interested in determining how the characteristics of a writer’s professional identity develop over the course of study in undergraduate and graduate contexts and how professional identity attributes transition from the academic context to applications beyond the university. 

Nadya Yakovchuk, University of Surrey (United Kingdom)

Dr. Nadya Yakovchuk works as a Learning Development Adviser and a Teaching Fellow in Higher Education at the University of Surrey, UK. She has been teaching and researching academic writing since 2002, focusing in particular on how to help emerging academic writers develop an authorial voice in their discipline, how students can be supported in mastering new genres, and how to create collaborative learning spaces that promote writer development. In her current research, she is exploring how re-purposing students’ academic work for an authentic non-specialist audience can transform their perceptions of themselves as writers and helps them develop confidence and authorial voice. For the purposes of this seminar, Nadya is particularly interested in exploring how to foster successful transfer to writing in research and employment settings, how to help students build confidence in mastering new professional discourses, and what role ‘internal’ and ‘external’ factors play in these transitions.  

Kathleen Yancey, Florida State University 

Kathleen Blake Yancey is Kellogg W. Hunt Professor of English and Distinguished Research Professor at Florida State University. She is also the PI for an 8-site research project studying the efficacy of the Teaching for Transfer writing curriculum documented in Writing Across Contexts, recognized with the CCCC Research Impact Award and the CWPA Best Book Award. Her recent collaborative work on transfer, forthcoming in The WAC Journal (2018) and College Composition and Communication (2019), highlights concurrent transfer and reciprocal transfer, i.e., transfer from school to other contexts and back. Since 2017, she has studied students engaging in writing internships, to see if introducing them to the Teaching for Transfer (TFT) vocabulary and to a specific set of reflective practices, influenced by TFT but including others, is efficacious.  

We were delighted to receive a robust set of applications (122 applications, representing 16 countries and over a dozen disciplines), and the strength of the applications made the selection process extremely difficult. Ultimately, we selected applications that raised research topics in line with the goals of the research seminar and that paired well with other applications to facilitate the formation of multi-institutional research cohorts. Our acceptance rate was 27%.