Our strengths as a program can be encapsulated through these concepts: Interdisciplinarity; Methodological Diversity; Career Flexibility; Technological Dexterity; and Transnational Perspectives.
Interdisciplinarity
Designed to provide students with the freedom to follow their interests and passions as they chart their path through our program, our PhD model is ideal for students who seek to work across fields, as well as students who value other fields as enriching their understanding of Composition. Our program provides doctoral students in Composition with opportunities to take courses and engage with faculty and students in a variety of disciplines, including the four programs that constitute the Pitt Department of English—Composition, Film and Media, Literature, and Writing. Students often augment their work in English by earning certificates in Digital Studies and Methods, Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies, and Cultural Studies. They earn TESOL (Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages) certification, learn to program computers, and do research abroad.
Methodological Diversity
From archival research to ethnographic interviews to distant reading to methods that combine creativity with criticality, our faculty encourage students to think across qualitative and quantitative approaches to answer their own research questions. Our seminars cover data analytics, distant reading, generative text with large language models, creative approaches to biology, ethnographic inquiry into writing across contexts and disciplines, evidence-based teacher/scholar inquiry, digital filmmaking and more. Students gain additional methodological support through seminars in other departments. Recent dissertations have used game-making, digital modeling, literacy interviews, and rhetorical analysis to chart paths forward in the field of Composition and Rhetoric.
Career Flexibility
The fact that we have few required core courses in our program means that—with guidance from their advisors—students chart their own paths of interest as they navigate their doctoral studies. Beyond our flexibility in the kinds of courses students take, our program is committed to providing students with flexible skills whether they decide to stay in academia or venture into the public, private, and/or non-profit sectors upon graduation. As we prepare students for a variety of possible professional outcomes, we value open scholarship and publishing and invite students to become proficient in several digital technologies and research methodologies that result in skills that make them adaptable in multiple professional settings. Through this variety of exposure, students develop an elastic way of approaching knowledge and knowledge production that often results in dissertations that blend creativity, critical thinking, public engagement, and digital making.
Technological Dexterity
We apply a broad definition of what it means to compose, recognizing and celebrating the multiple forms that academic and creative knowledge can take and the myriad rhetorical purposes such knowledge can serve. Our faculty have expertise in technology and media studies and offer seminars that support students' learning in digital composition and comparative media. Displaying an array of digital work and deep engagement with materialities of composition, recent student projects have drawn on practices from “technogothic conjuring” and dance to the keeping of homing pigeons as communicative devices as inspiration for Composition scholarship and pedagogy. In addition to the expertise Composition program faculty offer in digital literacies, filmmaking, mobile technologies, editing of digital journals, social media, and biological technologies, doctoral students also have the opportunity to benefit from several labs affiliated with our department and the campus more broadly, including the Vibrant Media Lab and the Digital Media Lab. Our students are also given the chance to teach in our Digital Narrative and Interactive Design Major. Beyond English, Pitt's Center for Creativity holds events and provides space to make pottery, typewrite, typeset, paint, weave, and 3D print. The OpenLab maker space supports 360 video, laser cutting, and virtual reality design.
Transnational Perspectives
Faculty in our program hail from China, Nigeria, Venezuela, and the United States, and our research crosses national, linguistic, and disciplinary borders. We’ve offered seminars on writing in global contexts and our cultural rhetorics and digital rhetorics seminars feature a strong transnational component in their assigned texts and course projects. Pitt Global connects our Global Studies Center, Center for African Studies, Center for Asian Studies, and Center for Latin American Studies, and more, offering funding and support for transnational projects. Composition faculty have published books and articles and made films on: how familial ties are tested by immigration; the challenges and benefits of bilingualism; how writers attune semiotic and rhetorical repertoires with and through migration; how circulated images (non/human), global Englishes, and rhetorical key terms assume distant, ambiguous, and new meanings beyond the borders of their production; and how our identities are transformed by belonging to more than one culture. Given our experience, we are are prepared to support students developing asset-based theories and pedagogies for working with writers across cultural and linguistic differences; documenting how writing pedagogy and research across national contexts intersect with globalizing processes and transnational mobility; exploring how rhetorical, writing, and identity practices shape and are shaped by power structures that simultaneously disrupt and reinforce borders of various kinds; and other transnational research projects you may design as you’re here. This transnational perspective extends to a commitment to anti-colonial and anti-racist practices globally and in the US.