My research has always been broadly interdisciplinary. Whether talking about the weird rivalry between Mark Twain and Mary Baker Eddy or examining the divergent professionalization paths of Russian and American writing centers or investigating the relationship between writing center usage and student performance, I tend to look for the methodologies best suited to answer the questions I am asking while hopefully also engaging those questions in interesting or counter-intuitive ways. Though I am trained in the literature field, my work tends to have an historicist or even empiricist—rather than interpretive—bent. I make broad use of archives and have lately begun using data-driven methodologies for the purpose of understanding writing center usage and effectiveness.
Current Projects
Emerging Writing Research from the Russian Federation
I was approached by editors at the WAC Clearinghouse in 2018 about producing a collection detailing recent developments in the growth of academic writing as a field as well as the proliferation of writing centers over the past decade. Though the predominant political narrative of Russia in the 2010s has been one of an inward, nationalist turn, the internationalization of Russian academia during that same period has only accelerated. In 2003, Russia entered the Bologna Process, a multi-national European agreement to align higher education systems to ensure academic mobility for faculty and students. Then in 2013, the Russian Ministry of Education initiated Project 5-100, an effort to launch five Russian universities into the top 100 of major international university rankings. This program included substantial funding for incentives for faculty who publish in international journals and for support services to help them do so, including writing centers that serve faculty and graduate students and increasingly robust writing components in Russian undergraduate curricula.
The first American-style Russian writing center was founded at the New Economic School (NES), a private graduate school, in 2011. The Academic Writing Center (AWC) at the Higher School of Economics (HSE) quickly followed. Since then, 11 writing centers and programs – some freestanding and some housed in language departments – have sprung up across the country, and a professional organization, the National Writing Centers Consortium (NWCC), has been established to support this burgeoning area of pedagogy and research. The NWCC hosted its first conference in Moscow in 2018, and research on academic writing has been a feature of many national conferences on the teaching of English.
The aim of this collection is to offer the reader a broad view of the changing landscape for academic writing, writing pedagogy, and writing centers in Russia by individuals with on-the-ground experience. It includes Russian writing scholars living and working in Russian universities, Russian-born writing scholars currently teaching in the United States, and U. S.-born expatriates with experience teaching in Russia. In many ways, it can be viewed as an extension of the work done by the contributors to Pavel Zemliansky and Kirk St. Amant’s (2016) Rethinking Post-Communist Rhetoric, conceived when the regional conversation was still nascent. With a special focus on the Russian context, we show how research in this area has developed regionally since the middle of the decade – a truly productive and arguably transformative period in terms of the establishment of institutions (like the NWCC) and the development of research, which in the Russian context has come to embrace approaches rooted in academic literacy as well as multilingual approaches.
In addition to featuring a region that has had little coverage in the previous literature, this book differs from previous studies in two important ways. For one, unlike Asia and the MENA region, Russia has no branch campuses of American universities (though a few private universities have dual-degree programs), and as such, these international models have had to conform to the complex bureaucratic structure of Russian higher education. What’s more, this work has largely been led and carried out by Russian specialists, who are the main protagonists in this story, in which Western-born and -trained specialists like me play largely a supporting role. Secondly, this collection makes a significant contribution to the field by providing research on the needs of multi-lingual faculty writers and case studies of support services for this growing constituency for writing instruction and services that has thus far been largely invisible given the Anglo-European focus on student writers.
I am happy to report that the final manuscript for the book has been delivered and is now in press with an expected release date in 2021. Because it included many first-time authors (or authors who were writing for an American press for the first time) and many authors who were writing in their second language, the editorial work required to shepherd this book through the blind review process at WAC Clearinghouse was intense and involved nearly as much work as the book which I authored on my own. I am tremendously proud of the final product, which includes a contribution that I co-authored with Olga Aksakalova of LaGuardia Community College (CUNY), “A Transnational Training Model for Peer Tutors: Authority, Rhetorical Awareness, and Language in/through Virtual Exchange Practices”, detailing our analysis of the responses of participants in our cross-cultural online peer tutoring collaboration.
Additional Writing Center Research
My additional scholarship on writing centers has involved explaining the writing center model to Russian audiences (see my numerous invited talks, conference presentations and publications in Higher Education in Russia and Higher Education in Russia and Beyond) and explaining what is happening in Russia to Westerners. In my essay for Mohanalakshmi Rajakumar’s Western Curricula in International Contexts, I examine the divergent paths of professionalization taken by American and Russian writing centers. Where the history of academic professionalization in the United States has largely been about obtaining freedom from market pressures, in Russia, the struggle for professional independence has occurred in the face of overwhelming government pressure for academia to serve state ends. In the most recent period, writing centers have been created in order to drive faculty publications, which in turn are intended to increase the prestige of Russian universities and thereby confer prestige on the state. In addition to the published chapter, I have presented on related topics at both regional and national meetings of the Conference on College Composition and Communication
Influenced, perhaps, by my years of experience working alongside economists and teaching economics students, I have also sought to use data collected through the writing center to answer questions about who uses the writing center and whether the methods we employ can be considered effective. Over the past decade, concern about whether our methods match the needs of our clients have grown, epitomized in the work of Jackie Grutsch McKinney and Lori Salem. Likewise, the work of scholars such as Dana Lynn Driscoll and Sherry Wynn Purdue has drawn the attention to the need for more writing center research that is replicable, aggregable, and data-supported (RAD). Without abandoning the humanist roots of writing center work or holding up “data” as an idol, I have sought to make my practice as both a writing center administrator and a researcher more data-informed.
My current article in progress, “A Deeper Look at Student Characteristics, Performance, and Writing Center Usage in a Multilingual Liberal Arts Program in Russia,” examines data on usage and student performance in the NES Writing and Communication Center and finds statistically significant relationships among GPA, gender, English-language proficiency, and writing center usage. Namely, writing center usage predicts higher GPA and closes two achievement gaps related to gender and English proficiency. These findings complicate the picture presented by Salem in 2016. The present study suggests that while users may have less systemic social privilege, they tend to also be stronger students. As such, interventions should take care not only to address the needs of the students who actually visit but explore barriers to writing center access for non-visiting students who are at the highest risk of dropping out.
Dissertation and First Book
Healing the Nation: Literature, Progress and Christian Science (Indiana University Press, 2017) was the first book to examine the connections between Christian Science and the American literary canon in all of their rich historical complexity, drawing on newly available primary material from the Mary Baker Eddy Library in Boston. This project began as a dissertation defended in 2012 under the title, “Religious Healing in the Progressive Era.”
Founded by Mary Baker Eddy in 1866, the Church of Christ, Scientist was one of the fastest growing and most controversial religious movements in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century. Due to their adherence to a form of idealism that deemed the body and its symptoms unreal and the mere projections of mental states, Christian Scientists eschewed modern medical treatment, ran afoul of the professional medical establishment, and were the targets of journalists and other public figures who saw it as a threat to modern society. But because of its ability to blend biblical Christianity with transcendental romanticism and the rhetoric of modern science, this movement also achieved a certain level of intellectual respectability and exerted a demonstrable but underappreciated impact on U.S. culture and literature.
The book examines that impact through the narratives that were produced around Christian Science, focusing particularly on the lives and work of Frances Hodgson Burnett, Mark Twain and Theodore Dreiser along with the writers who participated in the early-twentieth-century “muckraking” of Christian Science, including Upton Sinclair and Willa Cather. My contention is that literary history is a particularly useful lens through which to examine the cultural impact of Christian Science because of the centrality of narrative to the movement’s appeals to potential converts. At the center of Christian Science and all of the talk that surrounds it are stories of sickness and healing. These “restitution narratives,” as Arthur Frank calls them, had social as well as individual implications, as stories about physical healing were so often linked to broader narratives of human progress. It is the argument of this book that the stories produced in and around the Christian Science movement – whether critical or supportive – were engaged in offering restitution for a society deeply in need of healing. At the heart of this controversy was not a battle between religious traditionalism and modernity (as the religion vs. science debate is so often framed) but rather a struggle over modernity’s master narratives of progress.
In detailing their rationale for accepting the book, the referees for Indiana University Press highlighted its original thesis and interdisciplinary appeal. Work related to this project has been published in Book History, Studies in the Novel, and American Literary Realism, and Nineteenth-Century Literature.