Hi! My name is Marilee Brooks-Gillies. I am a doctoral candidate in Rhetoric and Writing at Michigan State University and will graduate in May 2013. I am a cultural rhetorician interested in everyday practices. I see rhetoric as a cultural practice and am particularly interested in emphasizing space and place as simultaneously rhetorical, cultural, social, and physical. This perspective shapes not only my scholarship but also my teaching, administrative work, and service. I have taught courses in writing center theory, first-year writing, basic writing, and creative non-fiction. My dissertation focuses on rhetorics of place, using oral history interviews and observations of a local women’s craft group, The Crafty Beavers, to study how the everyday practices of these women/graduate students/crafters make space and place. Like Michel de Certeau, I work from the understanding that “both rhetoric and everyday practices can be defined as internal manipulations of a system—that of language or that of an established order.” In addition to my dissertation, I’m working on an edited collection, Echoes of Home: Bringing Home to Work, which explores the ways that home practices influence the professional lives of Rhetoric and Composition scholars. I’m also co-editing a special issue of Across the Disciplines focused on graduate student writing and reading practice.
On more of a personal note, I grew up as a military brat. My family moved frequently during my childhood, which has spurred my deep interest in place, especially notions of belonging and rootedness. I completed by BA in Foreign Service and English at Alma College (Alma, MI) in 2004 and then interned at the US Department of State, working in the Bureau of Nonproliferation’s Office of Multilateral Nuclear Affairs. I worked a couple years as a mortgage loan processor before pursuing my MA in English Composition & Communication from Central Michigan University (Mt Pleasant, MI), which I completed in 2008. When I’m not writing about rhetoric or teaching writing, I’m baking, crafting, and walking.
