Assistant Professor
Department of English
Office - Bellarmine 14B
Phone: (610) 660-3271
Email: aknight@sju.edu
Education
B.A., Department of English, Michigan State University, 1996
M.A., Central & Eastern European Studies, Uniwersytet Jagieloński, 2001
Ph.D., Rhetoric & Writing, Michigan State University, 2009
Courses Taught
COM 2001 (Communication Theory and Practice)
ENG 2931 (Special Topics: Visual Rhetorics)
COM 2011 (Ethics in Communications)
ENG 4465 (Special Topics: Visual Rhetorics)
Publications
“About Face: Mapping Our Institutional Presence." Computers and Composition Special Interfaces and Composition Issue: A Thousand Pictures: Interfaces and Composition. 26.3. (2009).
Interest
Aesthetics
Composition theory and pedagogy
Digital rhetorics
New media
Visual rhetorics
Pedagogical Style:
My classroom approach frames learning as a collaborative enterprise and knowledge as produced by people working together. To facilitate learning, I employ a method of rhetorical inquiry—which helps students work within and across the genres, objectives, and audiences that comprise various writing situations. My rhetorical approach facilitates a heightened awareness of the message under consideration as well as an appreciation for the ways people employ language, image, and more cinematic means for persuasive purposes. Importantly, my approach builds students’ capacities in understanding the diverse potentials for meaning-making within the context of word-based, visual, and web-based texts.An understanding of how people communicate provides a framework from which students can address the writing situations they actually encounter in their composing lives—whether they are conducting textual analyses, composing visual arguments, or designing digital stories. In my assignments, I tend to give students well-defined project frameworks, deadlines, deliverables, and expectations but give them considerable freedom to decide how they will meet these expectations. I call this “finding the freedom within form.” This freedom, I believe, best prepares students to be culturally and technologically engaged thinkers, writers, researchers, citizens, and leaders.
