Maureen


 

HOME

BIO

CV

COURSES

RESOURCES

 

 

Arizona State University

Department of English

Rhetoric & Composition

Writing Program

 

 

Arizona State University
Department of English
Box 870302
Tempe, AZ 85287-0302

maureen.goggin[at]asu.edu


Daly Goggin


 

BIO

My research oeuvre can be divided into four major interrelated strands:visual rhetoric and material culture; history of rhetoric; discursively constructed racial, gendered, and sexual identities; and composition pedagogy. These four strands are held together by a common scholarly interest in the ways in which discursive practices are created, circulated, taught, and learned, and the interdynamic roles they play in creating personal and cultural identities.

One major strand of my research opens new ground, particularly within feminist methodologies, visual rhetoric, and material culture studies, by shifting attention away from the visual artifact as interpreted text toward the material practices that construct and circulate it. More specifically, in this line of inquiry I examine needlework as a form of meaningful mark-making—a polysemous system of writing. Among the projects that comprise this area, I trace the history of needlework sampler making to demonstrate the ways in which rhetorical practices once formed can be displaced, transformed and then erased as they emerge in new constellations that establish new relationships among rhetors, interlocutors, artifacts, and locations. In this work, I offer a methodology for theorizing and historicizing praxis. My scholarship in this area has appeared in journals and edited collections. This strand also figures prominently in four edited collections on Women and Material Culture that I co-edited with Beth Fowkes Tobin: Women and Things, 1750-1950: Gendered Material Strategies (Ashgate, 2009); Women and the Material Culture of Needlework and Textiles, 1750-1950 (Ashgate, 2009); Material Women, 1750-1950: Consuming Desires and Collecting Practices (Ashgate, 2009); and Women and the Material Culture of Death (2013). Also with Andrea Freeser and Beth Fowkes Tobin, I have published The Materiality of Color: The Production, Circulation, and Application of Dyes and Pigments 1400-1800 (Ashgate, 2012).

In a second strand of my research, I trace the complex history of what historian Robert Connors called the “transmogrification” of rhetoric in the late nineteenth century, the concomitant emergence of composition, and the subsequent post-WW II disciplinary formation of rhetoric and composition. My work in this area has appeared in numerous articles and chapters in edited collections, and is most fully explored in my book Authoring a Discipline: The Post-World War II Emergence of Rhetoric and Composition, (Lawrence Erlbaum, 2000). This focus also informs the collection I edited, Inventing a Discipline: Rhetoric Scholarship in Honor of Richard E. Young (NCTE, 2000). This latter work recognizes not only the enormous contributions Young has made to reviving rhetorical invention but also, in a larger sense, it recognizes the role his mentoring has played in helping to invent the discipline of rhetoric and composition. A compilation of current rhetoric scholarship conducted by his former students, it offers a glimpse into the discipline in the process of inventing itself. I am currently co-authoring a history of path breaking women in rhetoric and composition (1970-1985) with Professor Maureen Mathison.

A third strand of my scholarship explores intersections among race, gender, and sexuality in everyday texts, and appears in journal articles and edited collections. It also informs the collection Racialized Politics of Desire in Personal Ads (Rowman and Littlefield, 2008) that I co-edited with Neal A. Lester. The essays in this volume examine how complex intersections among the social categories of race, gender and sexuality within personal ads reveal a dynamic tapestry of power relations and hierarchies. By focusing on how, in each instance, African Americans both construct and are constructed discursively in the brief narrative space of personals, this collection offers a substantively new genre-based exploration of the politics of desire.

Within the fourth strand of research on composition pedagogy, I have published numerous articles and book chapters on the history of composition, on teaching writing, and on preparing writing teachers. This work also figures into the three substantively revised editions of two textbooks: Norton Field Guide to Writing with Readings (W.W. Norton, 2006, 2009, 2013) co-authored with Richard Bullock, and Norton Field Guide to Writing with Readings and Handbook (W.W. Norton, 2008, 2010, 2013) co-authored with Richard Bullock and Francine Weinberg. With Richard Bullock, I have also co-authored three revised editions of A Guide to Teaching the Norton Field Guide to Writing with Readings (2007; 2010; 2014).

Taken together, my past and ongoing research permits me to draw together a number of my scholarly interests, namely, in the history of rhetoric, rhetorical theories, the relationship between discursive practices and disciplinarity, the role of discourse in constructing sites of knowledge production and distribution, and the discursive construction/performance of race, class, and gender. These various scholarly threads also inform, and are informed by, my teaching of rhetorical traditions, classical rhetoric, theories of invention, history of English studies, cross-disciplinary discourse studies, material culture, and research methods.