Writing Studies at Millersville
The Writing Studies program offers students intensive experiences with both writing in different contexts and analyzing the histories and theories that ground composition in its many forms.
Writing Studies courses offer wide-ranging views of how writing functions in the world. Students in this concentration will have opportunities to study, for example,
- composing practices for diverse genres of professional communication;
- creative writing, in particular, fiction and poetry;
- the art of memoir writing;
- the language of civic change and how to participate in it;
- the cultural complexities of English-as-a-Second-Language instruction;
- the rhetorics of multimodal discourses, for instance, visual and digital texts;
- the arguments that define our racial identities;
- gender and rhetoric; and
- contemporary innovative poetics and the aesthetics of reception.
Through extensive writing practice informed by historical, linguistic, and theoretical foundations, graduates with this specialty will be prepared to respond effectively to writing situations across disciplines and in various professions.
Mission and Vision
In all of its efforts, the Writing Studies program supports the mission of Millersville University: exploring at every level of instruction the specific ways in which writing reveals diversity among people, cultures, ideas, and viewpoints; encouraging students' imagination and inquiry as they experience many situations for writing and reading; establishing in writing classes "unfettered discourse," speaking and writing in manifold forms tailored for diverse audiences according to writers' purposes; inviting students to collaborate with their peers to discover effective modes of discourse and, in so doing, appreciating the distinctions and common ground among themselves as thinkers; and emphasizing for writing students the power of discourse to affect civic change. (Please see a fuller articulation of this alignment on the English Department homepage.)
In these ways, the Writing Studies program also is committed to Millersville's vision--in particular, to facilitate students' engagement as productive citizens within their communities through situated, ethical, effective use of language.
The Department of English has six tenured/tenure-track faculty who are writing studies specialists.
- Dr. William Archibald
- Dr. Caleb Corkery
- Dr. Kerrie Farkas
- Dr. Timothy Mayers
- Dr. Judith Halden-Sullivan
- Dr. Yufeng Zhang
In addition, the majority of the Department consists of qualified writing instructors, many of whom have been trained in professional settings.
To learn more about composition faculty's research interests, please visit their book-length studies-Dr. Tim Mayers's (Re)Writing Craft: Composition, Creative Writing, and the Future of English Studies and Dr. Judy Halden-Sullivan's Reading the Difficulties: Dialogues with Contemporary American Innovative Poetry-and numerous other writings noted on each faculty member's homepage entry.