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DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.
Tara Roeder, Ph.D
Associate Professor
Director, First Year Writing
Department of Core Studies
St. John's University
 

I’ve been teaching in the First Year Writing Program at St. John's University since its inception in 2006.  My research interests include multi-modal undergraduate composition, feminism and women’s writing, trauma and psychoanalytic theory, and critical animal theory/intersectional anti-speciesism. 

 

My work as a compositionist focuses on interdisciplinary, multi-modal approaches to first year composition.  A 2020 book chapter “Re-claiming ‘Composition’: A 21st Century Interdisciplinary Imperative” (co-authored with Derek Owens and published in the MLA collection Writing Changes) explores the history of the term “Writing Studies” and suggests that, in order to fully reflect the polymorphous nature of textual production in the 21st century, the designation “composition and design” may better call us to imagine ourselves outside the disciplinary silo of English and explore our relationships to fields such as the plastic and performing arts, web design, and engineering.  I contributed a piece entitled "On Composition and Design" to the 2019 Parlor Press volume Exquisite Corpse: Art-Based Writing Practices in the Academy, and have given several national conference presentations about the term.  I am currently researching an article on multi-modal, postpedagogical composing praxis that explores the role of design and collaborative assessment in first year composition.

 

My 2015 collection Critical Expressivsim: Theory and Practice in The Composition Classroom, co-edited with Roseanne Gatto and published by Parlor Press, puts foundational expressivists such as Peter Elbow, Thomas Newkirk, and Nancy Mack in dialogue with other established and emerging Composition and Rhetoric scholars to dismantle a “personal”/“academic” binary from a variety of perspectives, including feminism, critical empathy theory, and multi-cultural critical pedagogy.  Rhetoric Review called the collection “bold and triumphant” and states that it “has the potential to inspire a new generation of writing studies scholars, especially those concerned with genre studies, public rhetorics, and/or social justice.” 

 

My current research explores the complex connections and dissonances among the animal rights movement and other liberation projects.  My 2021 essay entitled "Beyond Diet: Veganism As Liberatory Praxis" was published in the collection Veg(etari)an Arguments in Culture, History, and Practice (Eds. Cristina Hanganu-Bresh and Cristina Konrlik, Palgrave Macmillan), and I have a chapter entitled "Anti-speciesism as Social Justice" in the forthcoming MLA volume "Tell Me What to Do": Modeling and Models of Social Justice” (Ed. Neal Lester).  

 

Over the past two decades I’ve given over two dozen presentations at numerous regional, national, and international conferences on topics such as digital and multi-modal composition practices, postpedagogical approaches to first year composition, and responding to trauma-based writing.  I am also active in publishing poetry and prose; since 2015, my work has appeared in dozens of literary journals including 3:AM, fieldsThe Bombay Gin, Hobart, and THRUSH.  My most recent chapbooks are The Golden Age of Diners (rinky dink press), all the tiny babies of my dreams (Ghost City Press), Every Bird Is A Miracle, a collaboration with visual artist Arman Safa (DIAGRAM Press), and panic dance (dancing girl press). 

 

As an educator, I seek to create collaborative and creative spaces in which students with diverse values, educational experiences, and histories can engage composition in meaningful and innovative ways. I facilitate a flexible, workshop-based classroom environment that values interdisciplinarity, multi-modality, and student self-direction.  Every semester the writers and makers in my course publish digital portfolios that demonstrate that insightful, meaningful work can take place across a wide variety of forms, dialects, and media. 

 

DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.