Meg Garver’s MA in rhetoric and composition is from Clemson University where she wrote a thesis on women’s access to health care services. There she had her first experience as a composition instructor, and has privileged the identity, educator, ever since. Entering her 3rd year in the Joint PhD Program in English and Education, her interests are still within the rhetoric of health and medicine field, with a primary focus on doctor-patient communication. Specifically, she directs attention to barriers of access, including the technical language physicians deploy, as well as the gender dynamics at play within the history and current practice of medicine. Her interests include Science and Technology Studies, New Literacy Studies, Digital Studies, Disability Studies, and Writing Studies, all from a feminist standpoint. Meg hopes to build upon the work being done to merge the worlds of medicine and the humanities, and to help develop public scholarship, thereby making academic knowledge accessible to all.
Naitnaphit Limlamai is a doctoral student in the Joint Program in English and Education, where she studies secondary English methods courses and their instructors. Specifically, she studies how methods instructors conceptualize the discipline of English and the implications of that conceptualization for their courses. Before attending Michigan she taught high school English for 13 years in Florida, New York, and Georgia. She earned Bachelor of Arts degrees in Human Development and Philosophy from Boston College and a Masters in Education after completing the Alliance for Catholic Education program at the University of Notre Dame. At Michigan she has taught in the English Department Writing Program and in the Center for Research on Teaching and Learning.
Emily Wilson is in her fourth year in the Joint Program in English and Education. Her undergraduate degree is in elementary education, and her master’s degree is in English literature and rhetoric. Growing up as a military kid and moving all over the United States made Emily interested in studying the experiences of military kids, and Emily’s previous career as a middle and high school English teacher made her interested in adolescent literacy practices. Her dissertation focuses on the role that literacy plays in the lived experiences of military-connected students, and how these students use literacy to “restory” their narratives. She has also worked on a number of research projects at Sweetland. Emily was involved in the longitudinal writing development study, and she co-authored one of the chapters of the forthcoming book Developing Writers. She helped develop the data layer, a repository of writing development study data, for the Book Unbound project. And she has worked extensively with the MWrite project, an initiative to incorporate more writing in large undergraduate gateway courses here at Michigan.