Event Recap: WRD Professionalization Panel

Last quarter, WRD”s Student Community Committee hosted a Professionalization Panel for students to hear from WRD graduates who work as professional writers about their lives post-graduation. As Dr. Michael Gallaway, who facilitated the panel shared, “The goal is to talk about what life is like after you leave DePaul and after you have received your degree from the WRD Department, including what kind of things you might be doing and some of the intricacies of professional writing jobs.”  WRD undergraduate and graduate students joined the panel on Zoom, which included three speakers: one DePaul Career Center staff member and two

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Updates from WRD’s Equity Committee

This year, the WRD Equity Committee is demonstrating more commitment to the students, staff, and faculty of the department. Through events, a public whiteboard, grant-funded research, and additional projects, the committee is facilitating conversations on equity and striving to make the department more inclusive and diverse. Read on to learn about these ongoing projects. The mission of the Equity Committee is to create practices to embrace and sustain DEI initiatives in the department as a way to respond to the wider WRD community’s exigencies. WRD Equity Committee member Dr. Maria Prikhodko Community Whiteboard During each week of the Winter Quarter,

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Alumni Perspectives: 2023 CCCC Convention

The 2023 CCCC Convention, themed “Doing Hope in Desperate Times,” took place in Chicago from February 15-18. Attendees joined the conference from around the country – and world – among whom were several WRD students, alumni, and faculty! WRD alumni Maddy Crozier (BA 2018; MA 2020) and Krissy Wilson (MA 2018) both presented original research at this year’s conference.  Crozier is currently a third-year PhD student in Rhetoric, Writing, and Linguistics at The University of Tennessee Knoxville, where she teaches first-year composition courses.  Wilson is a Senior Learning Designer at Northwestern University’s School of Professional Studies and an adjunct instructor at

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Student Perspectives: 2023 CCCC Convention

After several years of online and hybrid conventions, the Conference on College Composition and Communication hosted a primarily in-person convention this year in Chicago. Themed “Doing Hope in Desperate Times,” the 2023 CCCC Convention took place February 15-18. Many WRD students, alumni, and faculty attended, sharing their scholarship in various presentation formats. Here, MAWRD students Nan Denette and Maggie Rothrock offer insights on their convention experiences as first-time attendees and presenters. The Big Picture For both students, their first CCCC Convention yielded exciting ideas and new opportunities. Denette shared, “I was (pleasantly!) surprised how large the conference was, both in

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Community Engagement in WRD Courses

One of the WRD Department’s goals for students is to prepare them, at both the undergraduate and graduate level, to excel in the range of contexts in which they will go on to write. Practicing writing in a variety of contexts and genres, for a variety of audiences, is a key part of this preparation that is embedded into many WRD courses. Community-engaged WRD courses offer students the opportunity to deepen their learning by engaging with real-world audiences, learning more about their local communities, and producing meaningful writing with tangible impacts. Read on for perspectives from faculty in various roles

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Event Recap: PLACE-based Writing, Research, and Teaching with Kenneth Walker and Carolina Hinojosa

On January 25, the WRD Speaker Series Committee welcomed Dr. Kenneth Walker and Carolina Hinojosa, from the University of Texas, San Antonio, for another installment of the Writing & Rhetoric Across Borders speaker series. In the virtual event, Walker and Hinojosa presented a Pedagogical Conversation on Environmental Rhetorics titled “Place, Liberation, Advocacy, Community, Environment: (PLACE)-based writing, research, and teaching in transdisciplinary rhetorical studies.” Read on for highlights of the insightful presentation and discussion.  To give context to PLACE-based pedagogy, Walker and Hinojosa explored community engaged projects across San Antonio. Three key aspects informed the presentation’s rhetorical lens: place-keeping, decolonization, and

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Winter Break Reading Recommendations

Although more reading may seem daunting now, at the end of the quarter, the month-long winter break is a great time to reinvigorate your reading muscles. We sought out some recommendations for what to read during break and have some options for readers of all kinds. Enjoy this list of our ten picks – and have a wonderful break! For Enlightenment How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy – Recommended by WRD GA Amanda Finn This book is a gorgeous examination of how we interact with our digital selves. As members of a 24/7 online environment (whether we actively

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Event Recap: Ecological Rhetorics in vivo/in situ: Precarity Infrastructure Across Borders with Dr. Jennifer Clary-Lemon

On Wednesday, October 5, the DePaul WRD community was joined by WRD alumna Dr. Jennifer Clary-Lemon, who restarted the in-person Writing and Rhetoric Across Borders Speaker Series! Her presentation, “Ecological Rhetorics in vivo/in situ: Precarity Infrastructure Across Borders.” examined both “human and nonhuman elements of the rhetorical situation . . . in vivo/in situ,” that is, “in living bodies and on site.” Clary-Lemon, rhetorician and associate professor at the University of Waterloo, shared her examination of “precarity infrastructure”—measures that act as mitigation for human harms against the environment, often without success. In her presentation, Clary-Lemon discussed her field research on

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Alumni Spotlight: Krissy Wilson

We caught up with yet another WRD alumna who took a more teaching oriented career path. Krissy Wilson (class of 2018) is an Instructional/Learning Designer at Northwestern as well as an adjunct here at DePaul, and we checked in with her to see what her day-to-day is like, and how WRD helped prepare her.  What about this job drew you in? Did you know a career like this was an option? After I completed an MFA in Writing at the School of the Art Institute in 2014, I ended up applying to DePaul’s MA in Writing, Rhetoric, and Discourse, looking

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Alumni Spotlight: Rachel Landgraf

After graduation, life moves pretty fast–and sometimes in directions you never expected. At least, that’s the case for alumna Rachel Landgraf who graduated with her Master’s degree in New Media Studies in 2017. For the last three and a half years, she has been working for United Airlines. We had the chance to catch up with her recently to see what she’s been up to, where her academic work has taken her and to see if she had any advice to share.  What do you do for a living? Is it what you believed you’d be doing after grad school?

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