This past fall, the Composition program welcomed 11 new full-time lecturers to its faculty, reflecting a departmental and Dietrich School investment in quality undergraduate writing instruction.
Amy Flick 
Renee Aukerman Prymus 
All told, roughly 6,000 undergraduate students take Pitt Composition courses each academic year—including the required general writing courses Workshop in Composition and Seminar in Composition, and advanced courses such as Research Writing, Writing with Style, and Writing for the Public. Associate Professor Annette Vee, who directs the Composition program, sees this new cohort of faculty as a great step forward both in supporting innovative, flexible teachers and in providing quality education for undergraduates.
"A lot of other universities are using more contingent faculty for composition courses," Vee said. The problem with that model is that in-demand contingent faculty are not always brought on until late in the game, when the class sections are filled—which means that the best teachers are often either unavailable to take on courses or have little lead time to prepare them. "So there was a definite need [for full-time faculty] in terms of scheduling," Vee continued.
April Flynn 
Tim Maddocks 
The Composition program itself is expanding. The Public and Professional Writing (PPW) program now offers both a major and a certificate—and is continually diversifying its offerings under the direction of Megan Kappel, who is one of the new lecturers. Vee said that there are currently about 50 PPW majors, and that Composition's commitment to growth in digital, science/medicine, and developmental writing curricula makes this influx of strong, experienced faculty that much more timely.
Megan Kappel 
When the lines were opened by the deans of the Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences, Vee immediately got to work with Senior Lecturers Jean Grace and Geeta Kothari on recruitment and reviewing applications. "We were looking for people who were flexible, people who could fill the needs we have now but could also take on other courses," Vee explained. "So we were looking for people who can develop courses and who have taken initiative in their teaching."
With an excellent pool of 100 or so applicants, they realized they would be able to fill all 11 positions at once. "We had internal and external candidates, and we were looking for a mix: people who already knew what the programs looked like [such as Megan Kappel who worked closely on PPW admin with former program director Jean Grace], as well as people who could bring in new ideas from outside," she said.
Jeanette Lehn 
Just over half of the new hires included high-performing faculty—April Flynn, Megan Kappel, Tim Maddocks, Dana Nowlin-Russell, Sam Pittman, and Renee Aukerman Prymus—who had previously held contingent positions in the English department.
Steven LeMieux 
Flynn is a poet with expertise in medical writing; Kappel directs the Public and Professional Writing program after years of teaching at Pitt and elsewhere; Maddocks supports peer tutors in the Writing Center and has helmed an undergrad nonfiction collaboration with Pittsburgh's City of Asylum; Nowlin-Russell brings a rich professional writing background (and a Pitt PPW undergrad certificate) to a range of PPW courses, including Grant Writing; Pittman coordinates the International Café at the Writing Center, and has been active in bridging creative writing and the sciences; and Prymus, who earned her MFA at Pitt, has been a strong force in developmental writing courses for both domestic and international students.
In addition to the six lecturers who have been part of the department, five of the new lecturers are joining the faculty after having made significant contributions at other institutions, including Amy Flick, who specializes in the rhetoric of social practice; Jeanette Lehn, who is interested in ethics and writing program administration; Steven LeMieux, who works in environmental and digital rhetorics as well as in experimental design; Stephen Quigley, who has developed exciting new media projects centered around place; and Clare Russell, who has piloted stretch composition curricula at two different institutions.
Dana Nowlin-Russell 
Sam Pittman 
Senior Lecturer Marylou Gramm, director of undergraduate studies for the Comp program, notes that the newcomers have already made their mark. "Jeanette Lehn inspired nine of her Professional Writing in Global Contexts students to do a service learning project entitled Global Conversation Partners," Gramm wrote in an e-mail to T5F. "Each of Netty's students met weekly with an ESL student in my first-year composition course to practice cross-cultural communication while researching about their international student partner's language, hometown, and culture." Gramm also noted that Stephen Quigley and Amy Flick have developed a new PPW course entitled User Experience and Usability Testing.
As Vee noted, providing renewable long-term positions for committed faculty gives them and the undergraduates they teach more continuity. For example, "stretch composition" involves two first-year composition courses taken successively over an academic year, allowing developmental writing students to continue with the same instructor when they move from the first course into the next. Although Pitt Composition does not currently have a formalized stretch comp program in place, new lecturer Clare Russell, with her experience with this format, will see about 75 percent of her fall Workshop students returning for her spring term section of Seminar in Composition, Vee said.
Stephen Quigley 
Clare Russell 
This is the kind of continuity that comes with having more full-time faculty on the roster. Further, the job security allows faculty to effectively mentor their students over the course of their undergrad careers, and since the Composition program provides, as Vee observed, one of freshman students' first points of contact with faculty in a small classroom setting, the department's instructors are natural mentors on everything from sorting out majors to embarking on extracurricular research to finding meaningful internships.
The Dietrich School's investment in writing across the curriculum is evident not only with the addition of these new faculty members, but also in its establishment of the William S. Dietrich II Institute for Writing Excellence, directed by Senior Lecturer Jean Grace, who developed and directed the PPW program and was former associate director at the Writing Center.
—Ellen M. Smith