Rebecca Brittenham
Assistant Professor
Director of First-Year Writing
Education
PhD, Rutgers University
Background:
I grew up in Seattle, did my graduate work at Rutgers University in New Jersey, got my first job at Long Island University in Brooklyn, then joined the IU South Bend English Department in 1999.
Teaching Interests:
My core interest is in the teaching of writing at all levels and in various contexts. While my greatest passion and energy goes into teaching our sequence of first-year writing courses, W031, W130, and W131, I love spinning out the more nuanced moves of essay writing in W250, “Contexts for Writing,” and in W350, “Advanced Expository Writing,” and theorizing those moves in L502, our graduate course on Composition Studies and Literacy. I thoroughly enjoy teaching Women’s Studies courses, Victorian Literature, and the occasional MLS course or Senior Seminar as well, but I find sneaky ways to teach writing in all those courses as well.
Research Interests:
My work in Composition/Rhetoric focuses on the impact of 1960s counter-cultural politics, in television, in the canon of anthologies used in writing classroom, and on the field of Composition Studies itself. I have published articles on this topic in JAC and in College English, and am currently revising an additional article on Sixties revolutionaries. Along with Hildegard Hoeller, I published a dictionary of academic literacy, Key Words for Academic Writers (Pearson Longman, 2004). I also co-authored a Composition anthology, Making Sense: Readings for Writers (2nd ed., Houghton Mifflin, 2006). My most recent project is an examination of British invasion fiction from the late nineteenth century as a fabulously documentable case of the power of rhetoric to mobilize a country into war.
