The Center for Writing Studies hosts events each semester designed to support writing and writing-related research. These events include: 

  1. Research & Teaching Events: Events designed to support people researching and/or teaching writing
  2. Gesa E. Kirsch Graduate Symposium: Annual research forum where Illinois graduate students—working on topics within writing, rhetoric, literacy, discourse, media, and communication—present work-in-progress
  3. Symposium: Day long or multi-day events in which invited speakers give research talks and facilitate workshops on topics of interest to the CWS community
  4. Graduate Research Forums: In fulfillment of writing studies graduate concentration requirements, CWS graduate students present their dissertation research to members of the Center's community. 

Below are examples of past CWS-hosted events. A full list of past events can be viewed in Box.

 

Research & Teaching Events

Supporting writing-related research and teaching

Lesson Plan Swap

Instructors exchange teaching strategies and classroom activities on writing instruction and multimodal composition

Art of Research Storytelling

Cross-disciplinary speakers present humanities-inspired methods for engaging research communication

Bess Myers: Plato's Rhetorical Universe

Examination of what rhetorical theory misses by overlooking Plato’s Timaeus and how it reshapes “classical” rhetoric today.

Toby Beauchamp: Embracing Trans Regret under Authoritarianism

Discussion of how openly embracing complex feelings offers an important response to authoritarian attacks on trans life

Carol Tilley: Finding Kids in (Sometimes) Unexpected Places: Children, Comics, & Archives

How children’s authentic voices can be uncovered in young people’s comics in the mid-20th century.

Lindsay Rose Russell: Preparing for the Job Market

Overview of the academic job market to help CWS graduate students prepare for jobs in writing-related fields

Christine Tardy: Creativity, Genre Innovation, and Academic Writing

A talk on how innovation and creativity shape academic writing genres, illustrated through classroom research and implications for writing instruction.

Gesa E. Kirsch Graduate Symposium

Organized by graduate students for graduate students featuring a CWS alum keynote speaker
Amber Buck headshot

2024: Amber Buck

Keynote Amber Buck described and analyzed the digital literacy practices of one grassroots community group responding to redistricting.
Jonathan Stone headshot

2020: Jonathan Stone

Keynote Jonathan W. Stone invited a rhetorical journey, connecting memory, history, and the archive with place, sensation, and the lived experience of (and resistance to) change.
Eileen Lagman headshot

2021: Eileen Lagman

Keynote Eileen Lagman reflected on what it means to study literacy in a cultural moment characterized by precarity, grief, and loss.
Kevin Roozen headshot

2018: Kevin Roozen

Keynote Kevin Roozen spoke on “Tracing Mediated Action through the World: Understanding the Enduring Consequences of Acting with Inscriptions.”

Symposia
Connect and collaborate with speakers in your field!

Bernadette Calafell

"Revolutions are Built on Hope: Cassian Andor and the Revolutionary Politics of Hope in the Star Wars Universe"

Romeo Garcia

"Archives and (Decolonizing) Archival Impressions in Times of Modern/Colonial Technologies"

Laura Gonzales and Ramón Antonio Martínez

"Race, Translanguaging, and Language Ideologies Across the Lifespan"

Graduate Research Forums

Dissertation presentations from CWS Graduate Students

Bri Lafond

In this talk, Bri Lafond explicates the multimodal composing practices of two YouTube video essayists to demonstrate how algorithmic surveillance constrains discursive possibilities for creators, while also highlighting how these creators resist that surveillance through "queer use" of the platform.

Logan Middleton

In this talk, Logan Middleton argues that prison educators mobilize complex and highly situated literacy practices to circumnavigate state power and sustain educational commitments to incarcerated students in the face of state violence.

Megan Mericle

In this talk, Megan Mericle explores tensions between the possibilities of citizen science for recognizing nontraditional, lifelong pathways to scientific becoming and the failures of citizen science in addressing histories of scientific exclusion and exploitation.

Carrie James

In this talk, Carrie James discusses interventions in pre-service teacher trainings that aimed to foster empathetic instructional practices designed to embrace and sustain students’ out-of-school literature practices, funds of knowledge, and cultural heritages.

Ryan Ware

In this talk, Ryan Ware argues that Writing Studies needs flexible, theoretically-grounded methods to trace becoming across lifespan trajectories, methods that support dialogic openings, and deepenings and enrichment of individuals’ storied experiences with lifespan writing.