Jonathan Alexander

Last updated
Jonathan Alexander
Born (1967-10-02) October 2, 1967 (age 56)
New Orleans, Louisiana
OccupationAcademic, Cultural Critic, Editor, and Memoirist
Citizenship American
EducationPh.D., Comparative Literature
Alma mater Louisiana State University
SubjectWriting Studies & Rhetoric, New Media Studies & Digital Rhetoric, Genre and Popular Fiction, Life Writing, Sexuality Studies
Years active1990-present
Website
the-blank-page.com

Jonathan Alexander (born October 2, 1967) is an American rhetorician and memoirist. He is Chancellor's Professor of English, Informatics, Education, and Gender & Sexuality Studies at the University of California, Irvine. [1] His scholarly and creative work is situated at the intersections of digital culture, sexuality, and composition studies. [2] For his work in cultural journalism and memoir, Tom Lutz, founding editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books , has called him "one of our finest essayists." [3]

Contents

Education

Alexander received his BA in English and an MA and PhD in Comparative Literature (1993) from Louisiana State University. He studied with James Olney, who was the Voorhies Professor of English and an editor of The Southern Review .

Academic contributions

Alexander has worked primarily as an academic, scholar, higher educator, and administrator, with a current appointment at UC, Irvine. [4] He also works across media. He is a frequent contributor to the Los Angeles Review of Books, where he serves as Young Adult Fiction section editor and the host of the video series, "Writing Sex." [5] At UCI he is co-host of the podcast series "We Are UCI: Redefining Student Success for the 21st Century." [6] In 2019, he co-organized a poetry and art exhibit with artist Antoinette LaFarge called "Burning Time," an imagined memory project about Alexander's now deceased gay uncle, in which Alexander and LaFarge attempted to imagine and depict his possible mid-20th century life in New Orleans' French Quarter. [7]

Creative nonfiction and the Creep Trilogy

More recently, Alexander has turned his attention to writing creative nonfiction, publishing a series of memoirs. Stroke Book: The Diary of a Blindspot was published by Fordham University Press in 2021 and details the author's experience of a minor stroke and how he understands the stroke's relationship to the long-term experience of homophobia. [8] Another set of books, loosely called "The Creep Trilogy," uses formal experimentation to document Alexander's experience of homophobia as a kid in the Deep South and his struggle to come to grips with self-hatred. Recounting a similar set of stories in overlapping fashion, the retelling plays out different perspectives on his personal history and Alexander's attempts to come to terms over time with his past. The books include Creep: A Life, a Theory, an Apology (2017), Bullied: The Story of an Abuse (2021), and Dear Queer Self (2022). [9] Writing specifically about Bullied, author Julietta Singh offers a comment that could reflect much of Alexander's creative nonfiction project: "Expanding the cultural frame of what constitutes sexual abuse, he ruminates over the enduring psychic and bodily effects of homophobia. In so doing, this gorgeous book seeks to redress some of the ways we have used each other in the service of making marginalized life more livable, and ultimately redirects our energy toward the transformation of a world that continues to punish our differences." [10]

Awards

His books have been nominated for various awards, including the Lambda Literary Award and the Computers and Composition Distinguished Book Award. His book, On Multimodality: New Media in Composition Studies won both the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) Outstanding Book Award and the Computers and Composition Distinguished Book Award. In 2012, Bisexuality and Queer Theory was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Literature. Techne: Queer Meditations on Writing the Subject won the 2015 Lavender Rhetorics Award for Excellence in Queer Scholarship. Alexander is a three-time recipient of the Ellen Nold Award for Best Article in the field of Computers and Composition Studies. [11] In 2011, he was given the Charles Moran Award for Distinguished Contributions to the Field of Computers and Writing. [12] In 2018, his memoir Creep: A Life, a Theory, an Apology, was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award. Bullied: The Story of an Abuse was the recipient of a 2022 "Ippy" Gold Medal, awarded by the Independent Publisher Book Awards. [13] In 2023, he was given the CCCC's Co-Exemplar Award for "representing the highest ideals of scholarship, teaching, and service to the entire profession." [14] He also won the CCCC's 2023 Lavender Rhetorics Award for "Nontraditional Scholarly Text Award: Jonathan Alexander, Creep Trilogy, WRITING SEX, and Stroke Book: The Diary of a Blindspot." [15]

Books

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick</span> American scholar of queer theory (1950–2009)

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick was an American academic scholar in the fields of gender studies, queer theory, and critical theory. Sedgwick published several books considered groundbreaking in the field of queer theory, and her critical writings helped create the field of queer studies, in which she was one of the most influential figures. Sedgwick's essays became the framework for critics of poststructuralism, multiculturalism, and gay studies.

Computers and writing is a sub-field of college English studies about how computers and digital technologies affect literacy and the writing process. The range of inquiry in this field is broad including discussions on ethics when using computers in writing programs, how discourse can be produced through technologies, software development, and computer-aided literacy instruction. Some topics include hypertext theory, visual rhetoric, multimedia authoring, distance learning, digital rhetoric, usability studies, the patterns of online communities, how various media change reading and writing practices, textual conventions, and genres. Other topics examine social or critical issues in computer technology and literacy, such as the issues of the "digital divide", equitable access to computer-writing resources, and critical technological literacies. Many studies by scientists have shown that writing on computer is better than writing in a book

The Conference on College Composition and Communication is a national professional association of college and university writing instructors in the United States. The CCCC formed in 1949 as an organization within the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE). CCCC is the largest organization dedicated to writing research, theory, and teaching worldwide.

Patricia Bizzell is a professor of English, emerita, and former Chairperson of the English Department at the College of the Holy Cross, United States, where she taught from 1978 to 2019. She founded and directed the Writer's Workshop, a peer tutoring facility, and a writing-across-the-curriculum program. She directed the College Honors and English Honors programs and taught first-year composition, rhetoric and public speaking, nineteenth-century American literature, and women's literature. A scholar and writer, Bizzell has authored or co-authored half a dozen books, written dozens of articles and book chapters, composed more than a dozen book reviews and review essays, and presented a large number of papers at academic conferences. Bizzell is the 2008 winner of the CCCC Exemplar Award, and former president of Rhetoric Society of America.

Keith Gilyard is a writer and American professor of English and African American Studies. He has passionately embraced African American expressive culture over the course of his career as a poet, scholar, and educator. Beyond his own literary output, he has pursued – and in some instances merged - two main lines of humanistic inquiry: literary studies, with its concern for beauty and significant form, and rhetorical studies, with its emphasis on the effect of trope and argument in culture. Moreover, his interests branch out into popular culture, civic discourse, and educational praxis. A critical perspective concerning these areas is, in his view, integral to the development of discerning and productive publics both on and beyond campuses and therefore crucial to the optimal practice of democracy.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Diane Anderson-Minshall</span> American journalist (born 1968)

Diane Anderson-Minshall is an American journalist and author best known for writing about lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender subjects. She is the first female CEO of Pride Media. She is also the editorial director of The Advocate and Chill magazines, the editor-in-chief of HIV Plus magazine, while still contributing editor to OutTraveler. Diane co-authored the 2014 memoir Queerly Beloved about her relationship with her husband Jacob Anderson-Minshall throughout his gender transition.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Charles Bazerman</span> American educator and scholar

Charles Bazerman is an American educator and scholar. He was born and raised in New York. He has contributed significantly to the establishment of writing as a research field, as evidenced by the collection of essays written by international scholars in Writing as A Human Activity: Implications and Applications of the Work of Charles Bazerman. Best known for his work on genre studies and the rhetoric of science, he is a Professor of Education at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he also served as Chair of the Program in Education for eight years. He served as Chair of the Conference on College Composition and Communication, delivering the 2009 CCCC Chair's Address, "The Wonders of Writing," in San Francisco, California.

Susan Jarratt is professor emerita of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine. She earned her Ph.D. at the University of Texas at Austin. Her interests include ancient Greek and Roman rhetoric, feminist theory, historiography, and contemporary rhetoric and writing.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cheryl Glenn (academic)</span>

Cheryl Glenn is a scholar and teacher of rhetoric and writing. She is currently Distinguished Professor of English and Women’s Studies Director at Pennsylvania State University.

Harriet Malinowitz is an American academic scholar specializing in lesbian and gay issues in higher education, women's studies, the rhetoric of Zionism and Israel/Palestine, and writing theory and pedagogy.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Meg-John Barker</span> British writer and independent scholar

Meg-John Barker is a writer, writing mentor, creative consultant, speaker, and independent scholar. They have written a number of anti self-help books on the topics of relationships, sex, and gender, as well as the graphic non-fiction books, Queer: A Graphic History and Gender: A Graphic Guide, and the book The Psychology of Sex. They are the writer of the relationships book and blog Rewriting the Rules, and they have a podcast with sex educator Justin Hancock.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Feminist rhetoric</span> Practice of rhetoric

Feminist rhetoric emphasizes the narratives of all demographics, including women and other marginalized groups, into the consideration or practice of rhetoric. Feminist rhetoric does not focus exclusively on the rhetoric of women or feminists, but instead prioritizes the feminist principles of inclusivity, community, and equality over the classic, patriarchal model of persuasion that ultimately separates people from their own experience. Seen as the act of producing or the study of feminist discourses, feminist rhetoric emphasizes and supports the lived experiences and histories of all human beings in all manner of experiences. It also redefines traditional delivery sites to include non-traditional locations such as demonstrations, letter writing, and digital processes, and alternative practices such as rhetorical listening and productive silence. According to author and rhetorical feminist Cheryl Glenn in her book Rhetorical Feminism and This Thing Called Hope (2018), "rhetorical feminism is a set of tactics that multiplies rhetorical opportunities in terms of who counts as a rhetor, who can inhabit an audience, and what those audiences can do." Rhetorical feminism is a strategy that counters traditional forms of rhetoric, favoring dialogue over monologue and seeking to redefine the way audiences view rhetorical appeals.

Bisexual theory is a field of critical theory, inspired by queer theory and bisexual politics, that foregrounds bisexuality as both a theoretical focus and as an epistemology. Bisexual theory emerged most prominently in the 1990s, in response to the burgeoning field of queer theory, and queer studies more broadly, frequently employing similar post-structuralist approaches but redressing queer theory's tendency towards bisexual erasure.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Victor Villanueva</span> American educator and scholar (born 1948)

Victor Villanueva is an American academic and scholar in rhetoric and composition studies, serving the role of Regents Professor Emeritus at Washington State University. Villanueva was awarded NCTE's David Russell Award for Distinguished Research in the Teaching of English for his groundbreaking book Bootstraps, From an American Academic of Color. In 2009, Villanueva was the recipient of the Conference on College Composition and Communication Exemplar's Award. Villanueva has written and edited a number of significant works on the topic of race, rhetoric, basic writing, and the social and political contexts of literacy education.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Linda Adler-Kassner</span> Writing Studies Scholar and University Administrator

Linda Adler-Kassner is an educator and university administrator. She is known for her work in the field of writing studies, including co-authoring Naming What We Know: Threshold Concepts of Writing Studies, which was recognized by the Council of Writing Program Administrators.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cheryl E. Ball</span> American educator and scholar (born 1948)

Cheryl Ball is an academic and scholar in rhetoric, composition, and publishing studies, and Director of the Digital Publishing Collaborative at Wayne State University. In the areas of scholarly and digital publishing, Ball is the executive director for the Council of Editors of Learned Journals and the Editor-in-Chief for the Library Publishing Curriculum. Ball also serves as co-editor of Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy, an open access, online journal dedicated to multimodal academic publishing, which she has edited since 2006. Ball's awards include Best Article on Pedagogy or Curriculum in Technical or Science Communication from the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC), the Computers and Composition Charles Moran Award for Distinguished Service to the Field, and the Technology Innovator Award presented by the CCCC Committee on Computers in Composition and Communication (7Cs). Her book, The New Work of Composing was the winner of the 2012 Computers and Composition Distinguished Book Award. Her contributions to academic research span the areas of digital publishing, new media scholarship, and multimodal writing pedagogy.

Jacqueline Jones Royster is an American academic, author, and rhetoric, literacy, and cultural studies scholar. She is a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology and the former Dean of the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts.

Bo Ruberg is an American game studies scholar and professor at the University of California, Irvine in the department of Film and Media Studies. They are known for their work on queer theory and video games. They are the author of Video Games Have Always Been Queer, The Queer Games Avant-Garde, and Sex Dolls at Sea: Imagined Histories of Sexual Technologies, as well as the editor of Queer Game Studies. From 2023 to 2027, they are the co-editor-in-chief, with Liz Elcessor, of the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies. They are also one of the co-founders of the Queerness in Games Conference.

M. Remi Yergeau is an American academic in the fields of rhetoric and writing studies, digital studies, queer rhetoric, disability studies, and theories of mind. As of 2024, Yergeau is an Arthur F. Thurnau associate professor of Digital Studies and English at the University of Michigan.

References

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.