As Associate Professor in the department of Writing, Rhetoric and Cultures at Michigan State University, I seek to develop culturally-sustaining and asset-based pedagogies (Paris and Alim 2014) for first-year writing students, a population which includes many international and first-generation domestic students. I serve on advisory committees for curriculum development of the first-year writing, and I also work with the organizing committee of MSU’s twice-yearly First-Year Writing Conference.
Before returning to MSU, I lived in Paris for 25 years and earned my doctorate at the Sorbonne. My thesis, written in French, was a Russian-American influence study framed by Mikhail Bakhtin‘s concepts of literary polyphony, dialogism and heteroglossia. I am fascinated by linguistic and cultural intersections, and the translingual, transcultural, transnational and translocal student populations in First-Year Writing are a limitless field of inquiry, as we explore the students’ diverse “funds of knowledge” (Moll, Amanti, Neff and Gonzalez 1992).
I’m president of the Michigan College English Association, which offers a yearly Conference for teachers of writing.
I publish poetry and artwork internationally and give readings and exhibitions locally.
