Christopher Brown

B.A. in Interpersonal/Organizational Communication, University of Central Florida

Email: cmbrown@andrew.cmu.edu

Research:

Semiotics

Elizabeth Callahan

B.A. McKendree University

Email: ecallaha@andrew.cmu.edu

Research:

She is interested in political rhetoric.

Future Plans:

After graduating, Elizabeth hopes to get involved in political advocacy for nonprofits.

Personal:

Elizabeth worked as a high school teacher for several years before coming to CMU to get her MA in Rhetoric.

Maggie Goss

B.A. in English, College of Wooster

Email: mgoss@andrew.cmu.edu

My current research interests lie in feminist rhetoric, rhetorical analysis, and the thinking processes of undergraduate student writers.  Because I am originally from Ann Arbor, Michigan, after graduating from Carnegie Mellon with a Master’s degree in Rhetoric I plan to get a job teaching as an adjunct professor in Michigan and use that time to decide whether or not I want to apply to PhD programs in the Fall.

Chenchen Huang

Email: chuang1@andrew.cmu.edu

Research:

My research interest has been developed into three interrelated strands at Carnegie Mellon University, i.e. rhetorical borderland, migrant identities, enculturation of multilingual writers. I am intrigued by the idea of a rhetorical borderland where migrants are enmeshed in two or more diverse rhetorical traditions and attempt to establish their unique voice in a globalizing society. I want to uncover how postcolonial authors with a Chinese origin, such as Maxine Hong Kingston, Amy Tan and Ha Jin, whose writing contains elements of both their own heritage and the dominant culture of the place they live in, moved from one regime of language and culture to another. While my previous response to their works was to savor the diasporic experiences and evolving state of mind in their narratives, I have become more interested in how they as a minority group manage to create a new form of expression that caters to a global readership dominated by Europeans. I want to explore how Asian American authors recontextualize and articulate their Asian-ness/Chinese-ness in their struggle to forge new identities.

Meanwhile, migrant workers in China are facing the same challenge of having to deal with the conflicts between borrowing a rhetorical voice presumably not of their own and preserving their rhetorical heritage ingrained in their consciousness. I find the influx of migrant laborers from the countryside comparable with the flow of immigrants from different continents to American society. On the one hand, the frequent rhetorical exchange between countryside residents and city-dwellers resulting from a transformative urbanization has almost eroded the conceptual boundary between the two. On the other hand, there remains a deep divide between newcomers and established city elites in terms of communicative patterns. Migrant laborers are disparaged as tu baozi (country bumpkin) and the language they use is associated with uncouthness and primitiveness. In contrast, city-dwellers prize their literacy, knowledge of English for instance, as a way to showcase their modernity. I am interested in how the interaction of these two communities reflects the clash between local citizens and new migrants, a clash that is growing in importance as globalization has made migration and its tensions a worldwide phenomenon.

At last, I am driven to bridging researches in both composition theories and practice and second language writing. Coming to Carnegie Mellon as an international student, I find the whole process of being acculturated into American cultural and rhetorical traditions both fascinating and challenging. Now that American universities have become more of a globalized community, the readiness of non-native writers to participate in academic forum has troubled many compositionists.

Future Plans:

I am going to pursue further studies at Pennsylvania State University this fall to find a solution to this problem.

Gerard Yee

Email: playingsand@gmail.com

My area of interest is in the intersection between teaching composition and rhetoric as a strategic and inventive argument-forming process. As a scholar from the Singapore Ministry of Education, I hope to make use of what I've learned in Carnegie Mellon University to inform my work in curriculum and syllabus planning as well as support the teaching and learning of English in a multilingual society like Singapore. Upon graduation, I will join the English Language Institute of Singapore (ELIS) and be involved in their research on communicative effectiveness.