New Masters Students (2011-2012)
Jason Custer
Jason Custer is a first-year M.A. student in Rhetoric and Composition, a Teaching Assistant in the First-Year Composition Program, and a Digital Studio tutor. Jason received his B.A. in English from Eastern Connecticut State University in 2011. His primary research interests include rhetoric & gaming, computers in writing, and writing center practices. Following his M.A., Jason plans to pursue a Ph.D. in Rhetoric and Composition as well. A proud member of what he calls the "Nintendo Generation," Jason looks forward to transforming a lifetime of Mario and Zelda obsessions into a career.
Ryan Witherspoon
Ryan Witherspoon is a first-year M.A. student in Rhetoric and Composition and a Teaching Assistant in the First-Year Composition Program. Ryan received a B.A. in English at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock in 2007. Shortly after, he got married, and Ryan and his wife moved to Seoul, South Korea, where they taught ESL for two and a half years and traveled throughout Asia extensively. His research interests include writing pedagogy, rhetorical theory, language, religion, philosophy, and the impact of digital technologies on language, writing, and pedagogy. His ultimate purpose for being here is to learn more about writing and the teaching of writing, so that he can take that with him back into the ESL field abroad. He is also considering pursuing a Ph.D. and becoming a university professor.
Continuing Masters Students
Logan Bearden
Logan Bearden is a second-year M.A. student in Rhetoric and Composition, a Teaching Assistant in the First-Year Composition Program, and a Mentor to new Teaching Assistants. Logan received his B.A. in English Literature from Florida State University in 2010. His thesis will examine the multimodal interactions within the Old English Hexateuch. He is scheduled to present a brief section of that thesis at the Conference on College Composition and Communication next March. Upon completing his Master's, Logan plans to pursue a Ph.D. and a career as a professor at a research university.
Jessica N. Jackson
Jessica N. Jackson is a second-year M.A. student in Rhetoric & Composition and ateaching assistant in the First-Year Composition program. Jessica holds a Master’s in Public Administration (2005) and a B.A. in English/Creative Writing (2002). She has served as a session chair at CCCC and will present as part of a panel at this conference in April 2011. Her research interests include African-American literacies and cultural studies, and her current work focuses on African-American online discourse communities, and on the Black church’s use of literacy to mitigate ignorance of the law. Jessica enjoys singing, writing, teaching composition and spending time with her teenaged daughter.
Emani Jerome
Emani Jerome is a second-year M.A. student in Rhetoric and Composition and a Teaching Assistant in the First Year Composition Program. Upon receiving his B.A. in Creative Writing from Florida State University in 2009, Emani somehow managed to work five jobs within a year. He did everything from customer service and telemarketing to auto insurance and foreclosure law. Realizing the rather ludicrous state of the South Florida job market, Emani decided graduate school was worth the old college try. He is very interested in how technology affects pedagogy, and is particularly interested in how Internet culture has influenced the common vernacular among American youth. After graduation, Emani hopes to pursue a Ph.D. in order to further investigate America's ever-changing literacies.
Gilman Page
Gilman Page is a third-year Master's student in Rhetoric and Composition. Gilman received his BA in English from FSU in 2007 and currently works in Financial Services for the University. Gilman looks for ways to blend modern composition and rhetorical theory with knowledge management and employee communications to strengthen the relationship between University administration and students. Gilman lives in Tallahassee with his wife, Lauren, and his daughter, The Moose. His just-for-fun reading list this semester includes Justin Cronin's "The Passage", which combines Cook's "Outbreak" with Meyer's "Twilight" and makes him feel like less of a teen girl for reading a vampire novel.
Minors in Rhetoric and Composition
Marian Crotty
Marian Crotty is a third-year Ph.D. student in Creative Writing with a minor in Rhetoric and Composition and a Teaching Assistant and Teaching Mentor in the First-Year Composition Program. She received a B.A. in English from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an M.F.A. from Arizona State University. Her research interests include the rhetoric of popular culture, embodied rhetorics and the relationship between narrative theory and alterity. Her fiction and nonfiction has appeared in literary journals such as Blackbird, The Greensboro Review and Washington Square.
Larkin Romaneski
Larkin Romaneski is a second-year Ph.D. student in History of Text Technology with a minor in Rhetoric and Composition. His research interests focus primarily on the role of video games as texts in contemporary American culture, especially on how games act as loci of cultural convergence where ideas get populated across media by participatory audiences. He also reads video games "inasmuch as they act as texts" as a possible source for solutions to problems posed by Post-Modernism and Mass Culture. Larkin's dissertation is, so far, a look at how Warhammer 40,000 functions as a space of cultural convergence and how audiences acquire power and identity through that convergence.
Spencer Wise
Spencer Wise is a third-year Ph.D. student in Creative Writing with a minor in Rhetoric and Composition. Originally from Boston, Spencer holds a B.A. from Tufts University and an M.A. from the University of Texas at Austin. His research interests include feminist rhetoric and the ways in which digital technology transforms creative writing pedagogy. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Narrative Magazine, The New Ohio Review, and Hobart, among others.