Gail E. Hawisher is Professor Emeritus of English and was Founding Director of the Center for Writing Studies and the National Writing Project site at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.  

Professor Hawisher's published work primarily looks at the relations among new literacies and new technologies. Along with other publications, it includes the co-edited collections Critical Perspectives on Computers and Composition Instruction (Teachers College Press, 1989), On Literacy and its Teaching (SUNY, 1990), Evolving Perspectives on Computers and Composition Studies (NCTE, 1991), and Re-Imagining Computers and Composition: Teaching and Research in the Virtual Age (Heinemann, 1992). She is also co-author of Computers and the Teaching of Writing In American Higher Education: A History (Ablex, 1996) and Literate Lives in the Information Age: Narratives of Literacy from the United States (Erlbaum/Routledge, 2004), both aimed at exploring the practices of researchers, students, teachers, and scholars of digital writing studies.