Hi, everyone, and welcome to my DWR Faculty Information Page! I am an Associate Professor of Writing and Rhetoric in the Department of Writing and Rhetoric, which is the home of first-year and advanced composition courses at the University of Mississippi. The department also delivers speech courses and hosts the UM debate team and UM’s writing centers.
I joined UM’s faculty in 2010; in 2016, I began working toward attaining tenure at the university. I was awarded tenure in 2021, and I continue teaching a variety of composition courses for the department. In addition to teaching, I conduct research and serve on the department’s Awards Committee and participate in the University’s assessment activities. While I fondly recall the thrill of having a short story I wrote in 2004 given recognition in a student writing competition, my true writing home is conducting and writing about research in writing studies, writing centers, and related fields.
In 2018, I completed a chapter in the edited collection Remembering Women Differently; the chapter title is “From Erasure to Restoration: Rosalind Franklin and the Discovery of the DNA Structure” (2019). The chapter focuses on Dr. Rosalind Franklin’s rhetorical loss and reclamation of professional identity (Franklin is now widely acknowledged as having been an integral part of the team that worked on the identification of the DNA structure). Other published works include a chapter with DWR colleague Guy Krueger on the use of the Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives (DALN) as mentor texts in writing classrooms and a chapter in Multimodal Consulting: A Guide for Tutors, edited by Brian Fallon and Lindsey Sabatino.
I earned my Bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Mississippi (2006) and in 2011, I earned my PhD in English with a concentration in Composition and Rhetoric from Georgia State University in Atlanta. In addition to my educational experience, my background includes experience in various professional work settings. From store clerk and secretary to retail management and software instruction, I have been able to experience the multiple ways that writing and rhetoric support professions. My background outside academia is one of the many reasons that I enjoy teaching courses in our department’s Minor in Professional Writing. I advocate for and practice experiential learning, and I am always thrilled when my students are able to connect the work they do in my classes to the work and careers they plan to pursue after graduating from Ole Miss.
I am not a digital native, but I can remember the early days of the Internet, Apple, and Microsoft. Our family-owned business was among the first 1,000 domain names registered (in the early 90s); how excited we were to have an actual Internet web page! I began word processing in 1987 by becoming proficient in the then-popular WordStar software, and I recall the days when Lotus and Novell were considered leading edge technologies for workplace productivity. How excited I was to transition from sending print jobs to printers by typing in line code to actually having an icon on my computer screen that would manage printing for me! I used Microsoft Word before it was part of an “office productivity suite”, and yes, I was among those who laughed at the idea of millions of people using computers in their personal lives by means of a newfangled idea called a graphical user interface, or GUI.
Much has changed since those dinosaur days of computing, and my respect and appreciation for the power of rhetoric, the need for ethics and education in using rhetoric, and the media-rich environments we now use to compose and craft messages have deepened while rapid technological advances demand that we all become literate in ways far beyond the traditional boundaries of the 3Rs of the past: reading, writing, and ‘rithmetic. Now, we must be literate in a multitude of novel and non-traditional ways or risk being at the mercy of technology rather than being able to use it as the tool it should be.
Word Cloud Image of Alice Myatt’s CV (link opens CV PDF)
- PhD in English, Composition and Rhetoric concentration, Georgia State University, Atlanta, Georgia
- Associate of Arts with Honors, Itawamba Community College, Fulton, Mississippi
- Bachelor of Arts in English, summa cum laude, The University of Mississippi, Oxford, Mississippi
Publications
Book, Edited Collection
Writing Program and Writing Center Collaborations: Transcending Boundaries. (Eds. Alice Myatt and Lynée Lewis Gaillet). Palgrave Macmillan. 2017.
Book Chapters and Review Essays
“From Erasure to Restoration: Rosalind Franklin and the Discovery of the DNA Structure.” .Remembering Women Differently: Refiguring Rhetorical Work Eds. Helen Gaillet and Lynée Lewis Gaillet. University of South Carolina Press. 2019: 39-55. DOI: 10.2307/j.ctv7r41pr.7
“Public Service Announcements (PSAs): Focused Messages for Specific Audiences.” Multimodal Consulting Eds. Brian Fallon and Leslie Sabatino; Utah State University Press. 2019: 170-181.
“The DALN as Mentor Texts: Empowering Students as Literacy Agents” (Alice Johnston Myatt and Guy Krueger) The Archive as Classroom: Pedagogical Approaches to the DALN. Eds. Katie Comer, Michael Harker, and Ben McCorkle. Computers and Composition Digital Press. 2019
“Enacting partnerships: Writing Programs, Writing Centers, and the Collaboration Continuum.” Writing Program and Writing Center Collaborations: Transcending Boundaries, Eds. Alice Johnston Myatt and Lynée Lewis Gaillet. Palgrave Macmillan. 2017: 1-23.
“Applications of the Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing at The University of Mississippi: Shaping the Praxis of Writing Instruction.” (Alice Johnston Myatt and Ellen Shelton).The Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing: Scholarship and Application. (Eds. Nicholas Behm, Sherry Rankins-Robertson, and Duane Roen). Parlor Press. 2017: 187-203.
Book Review of Writing at the Center: Proceedings of the 2004 Thomas R. Watson Conference, Louisville, Kentucky in Composition Studies, 35.2, Fall 2007: 132-34
Works in Progress:
“Staying Alive: Libraries, the Legitimization of Rhetoric, and the Rhetorical Canon,” Revise and Resubmit request by Rhetoric Review. In revision.
“Talking through Text: A Literature Review of Scholarship on Asynchronous Online Tutoring (AOT).” With Rachel Johnson, University of Mississippi. In progress.
“More than numbers: The multiplicity of opportunities found within a writing center community’s institutional effectiveness plan.” In progress. (Proposal sent to Writing Center Journal; invited to submit MS)
“Using Assessment to Support Visibility.” In progress. (Proposal discussed with Scott Pleasant, editor of Southern Discourse in the Center, the journal of the Southeastern Writing Centers Association; invited to submit MS)
Research Interests
- Professional and Technical Writing
- Organizational Collaboration
- Visual Rhetoric
- Writing Center Theory and Praxis, especially assessment of
- Digital Literacy
- Cultural Rhetorics
- Participatory Composition
- Online Writing Consultations