At the start of each fall quarter we acknowledge transitions in our PWR community. Read on below for more details about who's coming, who’s taking on new roles, and who's moving on to new adventures this year.
Who's Coming
We’re excited to welcome seven new colleagues to our program this year to join us in teaching a uniquely large class of first-year students (including nearly 400 students who deferred enrollment for a year) and returning sophomores in the coming months. Be sure to say hello to our new colleagues when you see them in Sweet Hall.
Daniel Bush. Daniel is joining PWR from a postdoctoral position at Stanford’s Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis, where he led programs for undergraduates and graduate students. He completed a dissertation on late Soviet culture, and his fall PWR course is “Not Even Past: The Rhetoric of Collective Memory.”
Jeremy Edwards. Jeremy is joining us from the University of California, Santa Barbara where he studied Education with a specialization in Cultural Studies and Human Development. His dissertation focused on critical models for student development and new learning practices essential for engaged scholarship and student agency, particularly at designated Minority-Serving Research Institutions (MSRIs). His fall PWR course is "Exploring Voices: Race, Language, and Society."
Elizabeth Hille. Elizabeth has taught in the Department of Rhetoric and Language at the University of San Francisco as well as in the Writing and Literature Department at California College of the Arts. She has an MFA in Fiction and Literature from Bennington College, and her short fiction has appeared in various literary journals. This fall her PWR is titled "The Rhetoric of Resistance."
Matthew Redmond. Matthew joins PWR having just completed a Ph.D. in the English Department at Stanford. His dissertation finds that America's cultural imagination in the nineteenth century was organized around the fear of living too long. He will teach "Good Old Days: The Rhetoric of Nostalgia."
Sam Sax. Sam is a former Stegner Fellow joining SIS as a new lecturer in the Immersion in the Arts: Living in Culture (ITALIC) program. They will be teaching a PWR course on the Rhetoric of Art for ITALIC this winter.
Julia Schulte. Julia joins us having taught first-year composition, public speaking, and ESL in San Francisco community colleges and universities for 9 years. Her interests include experiments in peer review, the teaching of reading strategies, and native speakerism in ESL. Her fall PWR course is "Our House: Rhetoric of Community."
Lynn Sokei. Lynn holds an MFA in Fiction from Arizona State University and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Colorado at Boulder. What most interests her now: helping students craft rhetorically rich essays that are meaningful to themselves and insightful to others. Her PWR 1 course is “The Rhetoric of Space, Place, and Identity.”
Who's Taking on a New Role
As we move into the new year, several of our colleagues transition into new responsibilities in the program.
Chris Kamrath will begin the process of becoming the new Coordinator for Writing in the Major and Bing Honors College. He is taking over from Sarah Pittock, who has served as Coordinator since 2017. Sarah will direct BHC through this transitional year with Chris’s support until he takes over fully next summer.
After three years of expert leadership by Meg Formato, Emily Polk will take over the Notation in Science Communication. Emily will oversee a range of NSC components, including recruitment of new students, teaching and mentoring our NSC students, and assessment of final e-portfolios.
The Hume Center for Writing and Speaking will also have a new member of its leadership team. This year, Tesla Schaeffer will become the Associate Director of the Hume Center for Writing and Speaking, replacing Norah Fahim, who just completed her three-year term. Tesla will work with Zandra Jordan and the Hume administrative team on a range of Hume projects and initiatives. (Although the folks in Hume will certainly miss Norah, Sweet Hall is excited to have her back!)
Jenne Stonaker has taken on a new role PWR will pilot this year to determine a future direction for academic technology support, Coordinator of Pedagogical Technology. Jenne will support instructors in their classroom use of technology and help curate the complicated digital infrastructure of our program. To reach out to her with questions or requests related to academic technology, write pwracademictech@stanford.edu.
As a final note, we celebrate once again (as we did in the spring) that on September 1 Norah Fahim and Becky Richardson moved into their newly promoted rank as Advanced Lecturers.
Who's on Leave
After sixteen years at Stanford, Donna Hunter will be taking a leave of absence in fall quarter while she considers a possible permanent new chapter beyond PWR. As Donna wrote in a recent email to the Program, the opportunity to explore new possibilities came about as an unexpected silver lining of the pandemic: “When my sister, half-brother and I sold my parents' Silicon Valley home—purchased in 1973 when it was more about apricots and strawberries than chips—during the pandemic, it went for a ridiculously high price. This means that I have a financial cushion that enables me to, for the first time in my adult working life, leave a job without having another lined up.” Donna writes that she is going to miss her colleagues, friends, and students at PWR dearly. For now, she plans to stay in San Francisco, where she is an enthusiast of the local brunch scene and would love to share her expertise with colleagues who would like to celebrate her farewell and keep in touch.
Our colleague Tessa Brown will also be taking a leave of absence during this coming school year. During our distanced pandemic year, she found herself with more time to devote to several writing and business projects, and has decided “this is the moment to really give them my full attention.” Tessa also says she will miss PWR during her time away, and wishes everyone “much love and solidarity” as we return to campus in-person this fall.
We miss both of you already, Donna and Tessa!
Who's Leaving
We’re always sad to part ways with one of our colleagues. This fall, we bid farewell to Holly Fulton, who has relocated to Portland and is moving into the public sector to join an equity and inclusion research and training team. She made many memorable contributions to the program during the two years she was with us -- from her dedication to her students, her innovations with Slack and other platforms during our transition to online teaching, her work with incoming athletes over the summer, and her contributions as a Septembrist in 2020 -- and she will be greatly missed.
