Andrew Lucchesi just finished his first year as Director of Composition. His work has included training and mentoring the thirty English graduate students who teach English 101, and designing new curriculum for the writing program, including a Poster Showcase where six-hundred students display their research for the public every quarter. He publishes in the fields of curriculum design (see his chapter in Next Steps: New Directions for/in Writing About Writing, 2019) and critical disability studies (see his edited special issue in the Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy, 2015). He is currently writing about game-based pedagogy and “playable” course documents for college writing classes. Along with Allison Griffin, Andrew was awarded a Diversity and Social Justice grant to develop new English department courses in the field of Disability Studies at both the senior level and as large GUR courses. Andrew teaches courses on first-year writing pedagogy, disability studies and rhetoric, comic books, and developmental writing.
Allison Giffen
Allison Giffen recently co-edited the collection Saving the World: Girlhood and Evangelicalism in Nineteenth-Century Literature. This year she is on professional leave researching her new book on childhood and disability in nineteenth-century US popular literature. She is also collaborating on a digital humanities project in Critical Childhood Studies, that includes a website titled the Critical Childhood Studies Forum, funded through the Hatter award. In addition, she is developing a new upper-level seminar titled “Critical Childhood Studies” which will offer interrogations into representations of childhood in literature, the history and construction of childhood, and children as agents of cultural production. She received a summer grant from the Social Justice and Equity Committee to develop new curriculum in disability studies and is working on a new upper-level seminar in the English department, titled “Disability and Literature.”