Christine Hoffmann
Christine Hoffmann (PhD University of Arkansas, MFA Art Institute of Chicago) studies the shifting standards for credibility and utility that develop inside post-Gutenberg and post-digital rhetorical environments. Her scholarly work has been published in College Literature, the CEA Critic, PLL, the CEA Forum and, somewhat randomly, Slayage: the Online Journal of Buffy Studies. A few short stories can be found in Make magazine, Eclectica and Loose Change. She also blogs regularly on TECHStyle, the forum for digital pedagogy and research by the Georgia Tech Brittain Fellows. Christine looks forward to connecting the teaching of multimodal composition to her research into rhetorics of struggle, cultures of collecting, and the advantages of copious expression.

Taking on the Trivial in English 1102

When this school year began, everyone was talking about the GT convocation video that went viral. “You can do that!” was the theme of the speech, where “that” meant things like changing the world, crushing the shoulders of giants, and building the Iron Man Suit. Big ideas! Big risks! Epic… Continue reading

Reframing Multilingualism in the Classroom: A Poetic Celebration of Diversity

The World Englishes Committee invites you to a poetic celebration of diversity at Georgia Tech. Sponsored by Georgia Tech’s Writing and Communication Program, the event will feature international Georgia Tech students reading poetry from their home countries, both in the original language and in English, and conclude with a question and answer… Continue reading

Christina Van Houten publishes in Politics and Culture

Read Christina Van Houten’s contribution to Materialist Feminisms Against Neoliberalism, a special edition of Politics and Culture. “bell hooks, Critical Regionalism, and the Politics of Ecological Returns”  addresses the ways in which bell hooks’ thinking turns to a politics of critical regionalism, by tracing a line that discursively connects materialist feminism, antiracist… Continue reading

STUDENT VIEW opens Wednesday, 2/26*

Each year, more than 6,000 Georgia Tech undergraduates enroll in courses offered by the Writing and Communication Program (WCP), whose home is in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication. These multimodal courses are designed and taught by Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellows. To showcase students’ artistic work created in… Continue reading

“The Language of Tech Comm: Teaching Technical Communication From a Humanities Perspective.”

On Tuesday, February 18, from 11-12 PM in Hall 102, the Communication Colloquium presents “The Language of Tech Comm: Teaching Technical Communication From a Humanities Perspective.” LMC 3403: Technical Communication is a course that places an emphasis on workplace communication and that helps third- and fourth-year undergraduates learn strategies necessary for creating… Continue reading

Christine Hoffmann publishes in Rhizomes

Christine Hoffmann’s essay “Middling Through Somehow: Queer Temporality and the Disaster Meme,” has been published in Issue 26 of Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge. The essay discusses copia and the anxieties that surround abundance of expression in 21st-century online discourse. In (rhetorical) theory, copia promotes stability, correspondence and perfect… Continue reading

Now Accepting Applications for the 2014-2015 Brittain Postdoctoral Fellowship

Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellowship Composition, Technical Communication, and Digital Pedagogy The Writing and Communication Program at Georgia Tech seeks recent PhDs in English, literature, rhetoric, composition, technical communication, film, linguistics, visual rhetoric/design, and related humanities fields for the Brittain Postdoctoral Fellowship. The fellowship, renewable up to three years, includes… Continue reading

Marty Fink’s Spring ENGL 1102 course, Queer New Media

Britts, help spread the word about the Marty Fink’s Spring ENGL 1102 course, Queer New Media. The course will be the first of its kind at Georgia Tech, and will engage questions of digital media through an investigation of queer fiction and cultural production. There will also be a heavy… Continue reading

“We Can’t Stop Here! This is Tech Country!” Going Gonzo in English 1101

I’ve been thinking lately about one of the many useful comments my adviser made about the failed novel I submitted in the last semesters of my MFA program. She told me I’d shown bad manners. Instead of organizing the book into chapters, I used stick figure drawings to mark breaks… Continue reading

John Harkey, Rachel Dean-Ruzicka and Aaron Kashtan Teach the 20th Century

  The Special Events Committee of the Writing and Communication program invites all LMC faculty and administrators to the first of our Fall 2013 events: “Teaching the 20th Century: A Colloquium on Digital Pedagogy and 20th Century Literature and Culture.” On Tuesday, October 29th, from 11AM to 12PM, in Hall 102, three third-year… Continue reading

Iuliu Ratiu publishes in The Concord Saunterer: A Journal of Thoreau Studies

Iuliu Ratiu’s essay “Land Surveying as a Poetic Exercise in Walden and ‘Walking’” appeared recently in The Concord Saunterer: A Journal of Thoreau Studies, N.S. Vol. 21, 2013. Ratiu’s study contributes to recent scholarship analyzing the importance of land surveying to literary studies and shows that Thoreau’s interest and expertise… Continue reading

TECHStyle 3.0: Goals for 2013-2014

The editors of TECHStyle welcome new and returning Brittain Fellows to a new semester! We want to share with you our goals and objectives for the continuing development of the site. New Britts will contribute regularly to TECHStyle through their participation in weekly Digital Pedagogy seminars (see a sample post… Continue reading

Anatomy of the Bubble Girl

The moment Diane Jakacki showed me a picture of the Bubble Girl being chased by a bent but strangely menacing Prince Charles, I knew I had to write something about memes. That’s probably an exaggeration. I did laugh a lot. And I did do some investigating. Turns out Chubby Bubble Girl… Continue reading

Amanda Golden and Margaret Konkol on “What the Liberal Arts can do with Technology in the Classroom”

Brittain Fellows Amanda Golden and Margaret Konkol will deliver a presentation on digital pedagogy to the faculty at Oglethorpe University. See the poster and abstract for their presentation below. Abstract: Hybrid pedagogy, digital pedagogy, and multi-modality are all terms that roughly describe an approach to teaching that integrates technology with… Continue reading

Go Make Yourself Un-useful

In a previous post, I reflected on the successes and failures of a project I assigned in my Spring 2012 course on copia, and assigned again with some minor changes this semester. Students spend the first month of the semester gathering an eclectic mix of material, organizing it into categories,… Continue reading

Amanda Golden Reviews Marsha Bryant’s Women’s Poetry and Popular Culture

Find first-year Brittain Fellow Amanda Golden’s review of Marsha Bryant’s Women’s Poetry and Popular Culture (Palgrave, 2011) in Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature. In her review, Golden observes that Marsha Bryant’s Women’s Poetry and Popular Culture is a vital contribution to women’s poetry studies and postwar poetry studies. Bryant begins by engaging the vexed, often pejorative,… Continue reading

Brittain Fellow Ratiu presents at MLA

First-year Brittain fellow Iuliu Ratiu recently presented a paper on a panel arranged by the Thoreau Society at the MLA Annual Convention in Boston, MA. The panel “Recovering Thoreau’s Topography” (http://www.mla.org/program_details?prog_id=329&year=2013) was organized by Rochelle Johnson (College of Idaho) and Kristen Case (University of Maine) and had contributions from Laura… Continue reading