Laura Wilder

From SUNY, Albany English Department Faculty website:

Laura Wilder joined the faculty of the English Department in 2005. Before coming to the University at Albany, she served for two years as the director of a first-year writing and argument course at Yale University. Her present book project, Critics, Classrooms, and Commonplaces: Literary Studies as a Disciplinary Discourse Community, extends “writing in the disciplines” research by examining the field of literary studies. Despite major transformations over the past century, and despite what are perceived to be enormous theoretical divides among individual scholars, this project contends that literary scholars share a core set of rhetorical strategies for effective argumentation and interpretation. Professor Wilder traces the development of these conventions over time, from the first Publication of the Modern Language Association (1885) to the present day, charting how even when—or precisely when—applied towards innovative and progressive ends, rhetorical conventions serve a necessarily conservative disciplinary function. Using ethnographic and experimental composition research methods, she also explores the often unacknowledged role of professional conventions in the undergraduate literature classroom. This project contributes to our understanding of the complex social pressures of history and hierarchy on the production of scholarly discourse while also advancing research that can be used to help students who seek to enter into, influence, and even redirect those scholarly conversations. However it also explores the broader limitations of the “writing in the disciplines” pedagogical project, which, despite recent curricular “writing intensive” initiatives at campuses across the U.S., has encountered great difficulties bridging the gap between its research agenda and classroom practice.

With funding from the Spencer Foundation and in collaboration with Professor Joanna Wolfe of the University of Louisville, Professor Wilder is currently investigating the effects, in terms of students’ rhetorical effectiveness and in terms of students’ affective engagement, of heightening students’ awareness of the rhetorical conventions of literary studies. Additionally, Professors Wilder and Wolfe are collaboratively writing a textbook, an introductory rhetoric for literary analysis. For future research projects, Professor Wilder is interested in refining the methodologies she applies to literary studies in investigations of hierarchical discourse communities outside of academia, such as transitory ones that develop around a controversial issue in our media-rich but not always interactive “public sphere.” Additionally, because her interests in rhetoric and poetics overlap, she also plans to examine the writing processes and motivations, so often shrouded in romantic mystery, of contemporary poets and novelists.