Staff

Director

Diane Davis ddd@austin.utexas.edu Office hours: FAC 17, TBD Phone: 512-471-8735

Program Coordinator

Will Burdette willburdette@utexas.edu Office hours: FAC 8, M–F 8:00am–5:00pm Phone: 512-471-9293 (FAC 8)

Systems Administrator

Fred Stanton Technical issues: support@support.dwrl.utexas.edu Direct: fred.stanton@utexas.edu Office hours: FAC 17A, M–F 8:00am–5:00pm or by appt. Phone: 512-471-4510

Assistant Directors

	Eric Steven Detweiler eric.detweiler@utexas.edu Office hours: FAC 8, MW 9:30–11:30am Phone: 512-471-9401 (FAC 8)
	Kendall Joy Gerdes kendalljoy@utexas.edu Office hours: FAC 8, T 11:00am–1:00pm Phone: 512-471-9401 (FAC 8)
	Steven Jeffrey LeMieux stevenjlemieux@utexas.edu Office and Hours: FAC 8, Th 11:00am–1:00pm Phone: 512-471-9401 (FAC 8)

Assistant Director Emeritus

Megan Gianfagna megan.gianfagna@utexas.edu English Dept. Excellence Continuing Fellowship, 2014-2015

Public Relations Specialists

	Cate Blouke cate.blouke@utexas.edu Office hours: TBD Phone: 512-471-9401 (FAC 8)
	Tekla Hawkins tekla.hawkins@utexas.edu  Office and Hours: TBD Phone: 512-471-9401 (FAC 8)

Graphic Design Specialists

	Scott Nelson rscottnelson@utexas.edu Office and Hours: TBD Phone: 512-471-9401 (FAC 8)
	Cole Wehrle cwehrle@utexas.edu Office and Hours: TBD Phone: 512-471-9401 (FAC 8)

Archivists

	Sarah Noble Frank snfrank@utexas.edu Office hours: TBD Phone: 512-471-9401 (FAC 8)
	Laura Thain lthain@utexas.edu Office hours: TBD Phone: 512-471-9401 (FAC 8)

Current Staff

Meredith Coffey is a PhD student in the Department of English at the University of Texas at Austin, where she earned her MA in 2012. She received her BA in Comparative Literature & Literary Theory from the University of Pennsylvania in 2009. Meredith's dissertation focuses on contemporary Nigerian and Native American fiction. In addition to her research, she is currently teaching a literature course on banned books, serving her third semester as co-managing editor for TheJUMP, and working on the editorial committee of the Rapoport Center Working Paper Series.

Jake Cowan received an MA in Philosophy and Literature from the University of Chicago in 2011 and a BA in Religious Studies from St. Edward’s University in 2009. His doctoral work in the Department of Rhetoric and Writing is situated at the intersection of continental philosophy and social media, with a specific interest in Lacanian psychoanalysis and the ephemeral line between on/offline subjectivity. Currently he teaches a course on divisions in digital access and participation, and serves as the project leader for the DWRL's Excitable Media group.

Scott Garbacz is a doctoral candidate in medieval literature, as well as an enthusiastic and passionate literature and composition instructor. His dissertation looks at how medieval students were taught to conceptualize and create literature, using many insights from contemporary cognitive psychology and neuroscience.

Lauren Grewe is a PhD student in the Department of English at the University of Texas at Austin. Her work focuses on nineteenth-century Native American literatures and American poetry.

Dusty Hixenbaugh received BAs in English and Spanish at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, in 2006, and an MA in Comparative Literature from the University of Texas at Austin in 2011. As a Teach For America corps member, he taught high school English and coached a speech and debate team in La Joya, Texas, from 2006-2009. He is currently teaching classes in the Department of Rhetoric and Writing, and researching a dissertation on the nineteenth-century historical romance. In 2014, he co-founded the podcast LitWit, which discusses literature for a primarily non-academic audience.

Emily Lederman is a doctoral student in English. Her areas of focus include women and gender studies, queer theory, and contemporary American literatures. She is writing a dissertation on representations of archives in contemporary American Indian and Mexican American fiction. Emily received her MA from UT in 2012. Prior to graduate school, she worked in secondary public schools and at an education nonprofit, and she continues to pursue her interest in education reform. Emily has taught undergraduate courses in Rhetoric & Writing, including a course she designed called the Rhetoric of Eating. Currently, she is teaching a course on banned books. She has also served as Editor-in-Chief of The Ethnic and Third World Review of Books.

Keith Leisner is a doctoral student at The University of Texas at Austin (UT). He received his bachelor's degree in English and Writing from Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida and his master's degree from UT. Before entering graduate school in 2012, he taught English III and the Bible as Literature at Lake Mary High School (Florida). Since 2012 he has served as a teaching assistant for Masterworks of Literature, including the World, British, and American variants. Currently he is teaching Rhetoric and Writing and researching the concept of the author in twenty-first century American literature, as well as productivity and digital workflow. Additionally, he tutors and teaches English as a second language at the Texas Intensive English Program.

Regina Marie Mills is a PhD student in UT's English department specializing in Ethnic and Third World Literatures. She has an M.A. in English from UT and an M.Ed. from Arizona State University. Her interests include US Latin@ literature, especially Central American-American writers and memoirists, US immigrant literature, African American literature, feminism, the rhetoric of revolution, the archive, and trauma studies. She is part of the Video/Games group. In Fall 2014, she taught a class on Black public intellectuals. Her students explored the old and new conversations between a variety of Black public intellectuals from the 1850s to today. Her students edited Wikipedia in order to build public knowledge of such thinkers and created a multimedia essay applying readings from the course to issues Black Americans face today.

Aubrey Plourde received a conservatory degree in film from The New York Conservatory for Dramatic Arts and a B.A. in English/Writing from Rollins College. She earned her M.A. from The University of Texas at Austin with a report on nineteenth-century children's Bibles. Her research interests include religion, secularism, and education as they apply to childhood studies--and she is obsessed with the function of the imagination. Currently, she teaches Rhetoric and Writing and works in the Digital Writing and Research Lab at UT-Austin on viz., a blog focused on visual rhetoric. A fun fact: Aubrey studies children's literature (Harry Potter, Peter Pan, Alice--the usual suspects) but does not spend time with actual children on purpose.

Sarah Riddick is a doctoral student in the English Department at the University of Texas at Austin. She currently teaches in the Department of Rhetoric and Writing at UT Austin and in SPURS (Students Partnering for Undergraduate Rhetoric Success). In 2013, she earned an MA in Comparative Literature from University College London; in 2011, she earned concurrent BAs in Spanish and English with a minor in creative writing at The Honors College at Virginia Commonwealth University.

Audra K. Roach is a PhD Candidate in Language and Literacy Studies in UT's Department of Curriculum and Instruction. She holds a BA in English from St. Mary’s College of Maryland and an MA in Language and Literacy Studies from UT. Audra previously taught elementary school in the Austin Independent School District, and now serves as assistant instructor for preservice literacy teachers at the university and a teacher consultant in local schools with the Heart of Texas Writing Project. Her research and teaching interests include digital literacies and writing pedagogy, writing in online environments, digital scholarship, and developing skill in multimedia A/V production. Her dissertation is an empirical study of children’s writing in social networks.

Casey Sloan incessantly reads and writes about gender studies, Gothic modes, and Victorian novels. She has craftily parlayed these fixations into research interests for the PhD program in the Department of English at the University of Texas at Austin. Currently, she acts as a project member of the DWRL's Video/Games group, serves in VIGoR (UT's organization for researchers of the nineteenth century), and teaches the Rhetoric of Superheroes.

Jeremy Smyczek is a third-year doctoral student in English with a focus in rhetoric and composition studies. His research interests include digital pedagogy and activism, popular science books, the rhetoric of academic disciplines, and American Pragmatism.

Katharine Stevenson is a PhD student in English at The University of Texas at Austin, where she earned her MA in 2013. As an undergraduate, she attended New College of Florida in Sarasota. She currently teaches RHE 309K: The Rhetoric of Tourism, and is a member of the Modernist Reading Group and SPURS (Students Partnering for Undergraduate Rhetoric Success). Her dissertation deals with the authors Christopher Isherwood and Edward Upward.

Deb Streusand is a PhD student in the English Department at The University of Texas at Austin, specializing in Shakespeare. She holds an MA in English from The Catholic University of America and an MFA in Shakespeare and Performance from Mary Baldwin College. Her research interests include modern and early modern performance, metatheatricality, and audience studies. She teaches a class on the Rhetoric of Performance. She is a project member of viz., the lab's visual rhetoric blog.

Amy Tuttle received her MA from Texas Christian University in 2014 and is currently a PhD student in the Department of Rhetoric and Writing at the University of Texas at Austin. Amy’s teaching and research interests include multimedia authoring, visual rhetoric, web development and design, gaming, comics, and multimodal literacies. The interplay of rhetoric, technology, and women’s and gender studies lies at the core of Amy’s scholarly endeavors, unifying her academic interests.

James Wiedner is working towards his PhD in the Digital Literature and Literacies program. James is presently teaching an undergraduate course of his own creation, RHE309K: “Literature of Law.” Prior to beginning his studies at UT, James earned a Juris Doctorate in 2004, and his Master’s in Literature in 2007. James was a practicing for approximately 5 years, and is licensed to practice law in the States of Illinois and Arizona. In addition to practicing law, James has experience teaching a wide-range of undergraduate-level subjects, including criminology, criminal justice, and introductory Literature; with classes in the traditional classroom setting, as well as exclusively online classes. James’s present areas of interest are focused upon the present convergence of law, Literature, rhetoric, and technology.

Lily Zhu is a graduate student in the English Department studying the long nineteenth with a particular interest in the Victorian novel, orientalism, early science-fiction, genre-making, and video games. She received her BA from Washington University in St. Louis with a double major in English and Business, and a minor in Chinese. During her first year at the DWRL, she had a fantastic time working as the Co-editor of Currents in Electronic Literacy and she's sure this year with the Video/Games group will be no different. Lily currently teaches RHE 309K: The Rhetoric of Subversive Cartoons.