English Department

Jill Swiencicki
Composition
Phone: 898-5190
Office: Taylor 214
jswiencicki@csuchico.edu

I was born and raised in Buffalo, New York, and while I miss the snow, I have truly enjoyed living in Chico for the past seven years. As an associate professor of English, I teach courses in writing, rhetoric, pedagogy, and women's studies. I am also coordinator of the Academic Writing Program and advisor to the teaching assistants in composition.

Issues of social justice, and the potentials for authentic democratic process, are at the heart of all my teaching and scholarship. These interests took shape for me as an undergraduate at Mount Holyoke College (BA, 1990)-the first women's college in the country and one where issues of gender, race, and social class take center stage across curricula. At Syracuse University (MA 1992) I continued my study of feminist and critical theories, and taught in the university's Writing Program as a fresh, eager teacher of first year composition. While living in Syracuse, I also taught at a number of different writing centers and community colleges in the region, getting to know beginning writers with diverse, challenging, and always fascinating histories.

During my doctoral work at Miami University (PhD 1999) I discovered rhetorical theory and finally found the methods I needed through which to read the history of civic participation as it related to disenfranchised and marginalized Americans. I have published on the following topics: how rhetorical study enables critical civic engagement (in Rhetorical Education in America ); how to reckon with latent racism in our writing and critical race pedagogies ( College English , March 2006); and how to examine cultural artifacts that reveal the diverse and contested ways in which pubic spheres are formed, maintained, and jeopardized (in Multiple Literacies for the 21 st Century; Rhetoric, the Polis, and the Global Village ). I am currently working on an essay about the role of the polemic in social justice rhetorics, particularly as it appears in the protest rhetoric on the Iraq War and neo-imperialist globalization efforts.

I like to: listen to young people, be with my son and daughter, walk in Bidwell Park with my husband, read the New Yorker cover-to-cover in one sitting, share meals with friends, and show students how their singular, individual rhetorical acts DO have significance and transformative potential. Hope to see you in one of my classes.

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