Education

Ph.D. in English, Rice University, 1992
M.A. in English, Rice University, 1985
B.A. in English and Political Science, 1979

Courses

ENGL 101: Critical Reading and Composition
ENGL 102: Rhetoric and Composition

Selected Conference Presentations

• "Academic Honesty: Multiple Disciplines, Multiple Perspectives.” Conference on College Composition and Communication, 2008.
• "Never Mind 'State-of-the-Art':  Nitty-Gritty of Planning and Coordinating System wide Instructional Computing Effort.”  League for Innovation in the Community College Annual Conference, 1996.
• "Evaluating Electronic Conferencing Software:  Daedalus, PacerForum, CommonSpace.”  League for Innovation in the Community College Annual Conference, 1996.
• "Is the Electronic Classroom a Real Classroom?" League for Innovation in the Community College Annual Conference, 1996.
• "Faculty Networking and Planning:  Committee Approaches to Planning for Technology.” League for Innovation in the Community College Annual Conference, 1995.
• "Interdisciplinary Instructional Technology:  Now Exactly What Do You Do?" League for Innovation in the Community College Annual Conference, 1995.
• "Electronic Conferencing and Poststructural Analysis."  (Part of a panel "The Basic Writer in the Electronic Classroom:  Common Problems and Uncommon Solutions.) Conference on College Composition and Communication, 1994.
• "Another Network:  Using a Multidisciplinary Lab to Share Computer Resources.”  League for Innovation in the Community College Annual Conference, 1993.
• "The Computer Co-op:  Teaching Organic Chemistry on a Conference in an Interdisciplinary Mac Lab.”   ChemConf '93, American Chemical Society On-Line Conference, Summer 1993.
• "Altered States of Mind:  Freshman Composition on the Modem.”  League for Innovation in the Community College Annual Conference, 1991.
• "Write On-Line:  The Computer-Modem Composition Course."  (Part of a panel "Off Campus-Composition -- Removing the Distance in Distance Education.”)  Conference on College Composition and Communication, 1991.
• "Coordinating Curriculum in Developmental and Freshman English.”  Southwest Regional Conference for Teachers of English in the Two-Year College, 1990.
• "Marginalia:  Freshman Composition, Post-Structuralism, and Jacques Derrida."  Conference of the South-Central MLA, 1986.

Personal and Professional Interests

I was raised and educated in Houston, Texas.   While I love my home city and continue to monitor its culture and built environment, I decided to investigate living in other places.   I have restored multiple historic houses in Texas, Oklahoma, and Massachusetts, and I moved to South Carolina for family reasons only in the last few years, where I continue to practice my interest in historical preservation and gardening.  

While my area of expertise as a student focused on American and European literature and culture of the twentieth century along with applications of post-structural theory, my career  has focused on rhetoric and composition and on academic administration.    I have served as department chair for English and distance education and instructional technology programs and in various administrative positions, most recently as founding dean of The Community College of Qatar after my career in Houston, Texas.

My dissertation, Narration & the Network:  Postmodernism & Freshman Composition examined the effects of teaching an early modem-based freshman composition class. Based on that work, I have practiced and studied how students develop writing skills through the use of online tools, particularly electronic discussions in which they may experiment with examining texts, ideas, and their own plans for writing in a risk-free environment. 

Recently, for almost 10 years, I lived and worked in Doha, Qatar, where I helped develop the first American style community-college style college.  In this position I was able to influence how students could learn in the online environment, how faculty should be evaluated, and how students would meet the competencies important in core classes.  Personally, living in another country across the world enhanced my understanding of diversity, teaching and working with people from around the world.   Because of proximity to Europe and the Middle East, I also traveled to places I had only previously imagined:  from Berlin to Istanbul by train, and to Ukraine (my favorite country outside of the USA), Georgia (the country, not the state) and Jordan and the UAE.