معرفی
Jody Shipka is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), where she teaches in the Communication and Technology Track. Her research and teaching span multimodal discourse, digital rhetorics, play theory, materiality, and food studies, challenging conventional associations of composition with solely written texts.
Her educational background includes:
- Ph.D. in English with a Specialization in Writing Studies, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
- M.A. in English, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
- B.A. in English, Loyola University, Chicago (Summa Cum Laude)
Dr. Shipka’s scholarship emphasizes material practices and embodied cognition, arguing that composition encompasses aural, visual, and tangible forms beyond digital media. She examines how everyday objects—such as pinball machines, scrapbooks, and home movies—function as rhetorical artifacts that reshape understandings of archives, authorship, and human-nonhuman relationships. Her work integrates activity theory and remediation frameworks to explore how people repurpose marginalized materials for meaning-making.
Recent publications reveal a trajectory toward temporal rhetoric and social justice, with increasing focus on multilingual writers, memory studies, and the agency of nonhuman actors. Her articles consistently bridge theory and practice, offering pedagogical models for multimodal assessment that prioritize material-discursive processes over technological determinism.
While no formal awards are listed, her book Toward a Composition Made Whole (2011) received acclaim from scholars like Danielle Nicole DeVoss and Clay Spinuzzi for revolutionizing writing pedagogy, with College Composition and Communication noting its potential to transform writing classrooms into “some of the most exciting spaces on campus.”
Dr. Shipka actively contributes to academic discourse as Special Topics Editor for Composition Forum and through editorial roles with Writing Research, Pedagogy, and Policy; Studies in Writing and Rhetoric; and Computers and Composition Digital Press. Her current book project, To Honor, Rival and Revise: On the Process of Composing Other People’s Lives, investigates how flea-market ephemera can reimagine archival practices and ethical relationships with historical materials.
