New Publications From Our Faculty

New publications from First Year Writing Program faculty members and instructional librarians highlight the diversity of scholarship and creative work being produced by the University Writing Progam.



Writing against the Curriculum has been "a UW20 labor of love," according to Professor Randi Gray Kristensen. "It was born and built out of the series of convivial summer gatherings, the Cultural Studies and Critical Pedagogies Symposia, organized by our own Associate Professor Rachel Riedner and Byron Hawk, Associate Professor of English at George Mason University and editor of Enculturation, a Journal of Cultural and Rhetorical Studies."

Writing Against the Curriculum is co-edited by current faculty Randi Gray Kristensen and UW20 emeritus Ryan Claycomb, now tenure-tracking at West Virginia University. They co-wrote the introduction and separately contributed a chapter each. Chapter one was co-written by Rachel and Ryan, and University Resesarch and Instructional Librarians Cathy Eisenhower and Dolsy Smith co-wrote a chapter that challenges disciplinary conventions in form and content. These UW20 contributions are in conversation with terrific articles by colleagues who work as administrators and faculty at public and private universities around the US. Nationwide, Writing Across the Curriculum and Writing in the Disciplines programs offer significant opportunities for thinking critically about the role of introductory and advanced writing classes in the development of knowledges and writers; our contributors consider and act on these opportunities in the context of the economics of higher education, public discourses, legal challenges, emerging technologies, and shifting disciplinary boundaries.

Praise from GW's own Robert McRuer: "This volume is the guidebook to anti-disciplinary living and teaching that we've been waiting for. Composition and cultural studies come together here to expose the fractures in the corporate university, with its efforts to streamline production, contain difference, and turn out recognizable, disciplined commodities. Writing against such a limited curriculum, the scholar-activists included in this volume collectively seek to unleash all that is excessive and unruly about learning, teaching, and writing. In doing so, they position the writing classroom not as a mere gateway to disciplinarity and professionalization. Instead, the writing classroom becomes a resistant location where new forms of knowledge, new ways of thinking and writing, and unexpected but vital forms of critical conviviality are generated."

More about the book and its authors at Lexington Books and on Facebook

Professor Cayo Gamber’s publications highlight her work in Holocaust studies, writing pedagogy, and their practical points of intersection in a writing classroom. “Designing the Holocaust at the Sites of the Shoah and Museum Stores” (in Design Principles and Practices: An International Journal:3.6 (2009): 1-14) and “Engaging the Art of Peritext: From the Promise of the Index to the Allure of the Footnote” (in The International Journal of the Book 6.4 (2009): 55-66) are out now. “From Photographs to Elegies: Engaging the Holocaust in a Writing Course.” Teaching English in the Two-Year College, is forthcoming in March 2010.

Three short pieces of fiction by Professor Peter Levine will appear in the spring. - "La Jolla" in The Southern Review, "Ribbon, Tree, Father, Son" in Mid American Review and "Havasu" in Slice Magazine.


Professor Levine’s short story "How Does Your Garden Grow?" (which originally appeared in The Missouri Review (2008) has also been recognized as a notable story by a new anthology published by The University of Texas Press, titled Best of the West: New Stories From the Wide Side of Missouri.