Sites of Writing builds upon the multiple contributions of Anne Ruggles Gere across a long and highly productive career. The chapters in this edited collection, written by leading scholars (including some of Gere’s former students) to track her major contributions to writing studies, situate those contributions within the broader landscape of field development, and draw on those findings to assess important trends and project productive pathways for the future. The contributors to the collection consider disciplinary history, language and literacy, writing across the curriculum, digital rhetoric, writing’s extracurriculum, assessment, and English education, among other areas. Connecting these multiple fields of activity, Sites of Writing affirms Gere’s view of writing as a powerful social and cultural activity and of literacy, broadly conceived, as enabling cultural transformations and, in the process, transforming writing studies and other fields.
James Edward Beitler is Director of the Marion E. Wade Center and Professor of English at Wheaton College, where he holds the Marion E. Wade Chair of Christian Thought. He is the author of three books: Charitable Writing: Cultivating Virtue Through Our Words (with Richard Hughes Gibson, IVP Academic, 2020), Seasoned Speech: Rhetoric in the Life of the Church (IVP Academic, 2019), and Remaking Transitional Justice in the United States: The Rhetorical Authorization of the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission (Springer, 2013).
Sarah Ruffing Robbins is Lorraine Sherley Professor of Literature at TCU. She is the author, editor, or co-editor of ten academic books, beginning with the ALA/Choice-honored monograph, Managing Literacy, Mothering America (Pitt Series in Composition, Literacy, and Culture, 2004), the award-winning critical edition of Nellie Arnott’s Writings on Angola (Parlor Press, 2011) with historian Ann Pullen, and, more recently, her co-edited teaching anthology, Transatlantic Anglophone Literatures, 1776–1920(Edinburgh UP, 2022). She was founding director of northwest Georgia’s National Writing Project site, the Kennesaw Mountain Writing Project, and has directed numerous grant-funded public humanities programs placing writing at the center of shared cultural work. She regularly collaborates with students and community members in web-based writing in connection with public projects, as in the The Genius of Phillis Wheatley Peters initiative and the Teaching Transatlanticism online anthology. She co-edits Edinburgh University Press’s book series, Interventions in Nineteenth-Century American Literature.
