About
My name is Michael Faris, and I am a first-year PhD student at Penn State, studying English and focusing in Rhetoric and Composition. I currently teach English 015: Rhetoric and Composition.
I finished my master’s degree at Oregon State University, focusing in rhetoric and writing, in summer 2007. My thesis, Traversing the City of Blogs: Pedagogy, Performance, and Public Spheres (pdf, 1.8 MB), explores potentials for the blogosphere as a public sphere and the use of blogs in a composition classroom for having students engage in public discourse. My research interests include writing pedagogy, new media, issues of difference in public spheres, how we construct the private/public dichotomy, ethics, queer theory, feminism, and critical pedagogy. After finishing my master’s, I was an instructor in the English Department at OSU, where I teach Writing for Business and Technical Writing.
I earned my undergraduate degrees in English education and history at Iowa State University in Ames before moving on to teach middle school reading and language arts in rural Iowa for two years. While at Oregon State, I was a GTA for the English Department, where I taught first-year composition, and the GTA for the Writing Intensive Curriculum Program. I also served as the media coordinator at the OSU Pride Center last year, run the Corvallis Poetry Slam once a month during the school year, and have had poetry published in the OSU literary magazine Prism.
My CV is available here (pdf). I can be reached at mjf338 at psu dot edu.
“Our bodies are the battleground where a war to regulate and control gender expression is increasingly being fought.” - Riki Anne Wilchins
“And the day came when the risk it took to remain closed up in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” - Anaïs Nin
Banner image source: Delano, Jack (possibly), 1914-, photographer, Mountain farm along Skyline Drive, Va., ca. 1940. Available here.
