Remember Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park saying, “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should”? Elizabeth Pitts—assistant professor in the Composition, Literacy, Pedagogy, and Rhetoric program—is interested not only in that question, but also in exploring how such questions are asked and answered.
Assistant Professor Elizabeth Pitts
Now, Pitts is training undergraduate writers to do the same—whether they go on to work in science, shape policy, or collaborate in a variety of workplaces. She brings an exceptional professional and academic background to her classes, many of which are geared to students in the Public and Professional Writing (PPW) program. Not only does she have experience writing for government—including a stint at the White House—but she also went on to do a PhD in Communication, Rhetoric, & Digital Media at North Carolina State University, where her research focused on the rhetoric of genetic engineering.
Pitts’ current book project grows out of her dissertation, Distributing Biotechnology: (Re)Organizing DNA and Scientific Work, and postdoctoral research she did in the Genetic Engineering and Society Center at NC State as well as in do-it-yourself (DIY) biology labs in the United States and Denmark. “I’m writing about how you organize the work of science, how we think about the values inherent in the ways we actually do our work,” she said. Looking at genetic engineering as a “kind of rhetorical conversation,” she continued, “I’m comparing different techniques that you can use in the lab and arguing that they serve persuasive functions. I’m also arguing that some ways of composing living organisms have values that I find more or less preferable as a way of thinking through different aspects of the ethics and regulations.”
Pittsburgh’s status as a biotech center and the University’s rich opportunity for interdisciplinary work between the humanities and the sciences was certainly a draw for Pitts. She’s been reaching out across disciplines and encouraging her students to do the same. In January, when we had this interview, she was preparing to meet with an ecologist on campus about possible ways to collaborate. “There are endless research opportunities here at the University,” she said. Pitts was also supervising an independent study with an undergraduate writing student working at the School of Medicine “to help create materials that will bring together a team of physicians with radically different specialties, all of whom need to work together to help burn victims.”
Pitts has brought her rich experience and interests into her Public and Professional Writing courses. This past term, she was teaching the Bridge Seminar, PPW’s course for the first cohort of graduating PPW majors. “We did not call it a ‘capstone’ course because we’re trying to encourage thinking ahead rather than ending, a new beginning and new transition—and ‘bridge’ of course is a Pittsburgh metaphor,” she said. With only eight students, she noted, she could tailor everything to each of their interests, and she hopes to be able to do this even when the cohorts inevitably increase in size.
As her background might suggest, Pitts has little use for conceptual and practical separations between the workplace and academia. “One thing I like to do,” she said, “is have people think about the university as a workplace, too, which I’m finding is a conversation students are eager to have.” In the Writing for the Public course she taught this past semester, the class worked with Pitt’s Homewood Community Engagement Center (CEC). Since the CEC has only recently launched, the class was able to dialogue with the staff and faculty involved with the center about working “responsibly, respectfully, and humbly” with communities. Students attended CEC events, conducted interviews, and worked on multimodal projects related to this new Pitt initiative. One strand of the class’s work, Pitts said, was “helping the University think through how researchers across the disciplines follow up with the people who participate in our research.”
Getting out into the community is also a way for Pitts to learn about her family’s new home. Long before she joined Pitt English faculty, she’d already heard about the Center for PostNatural History, a museum that exhibits organisms who have been altered in some way by humans. For a scholar who studies genetic engineering, it’s certainly a museum to visit many times. In a broader sense, it’s an instance of public science—something Pitts keeps her antenna up for. “It’s wild,” she said of the center, which is located on Penn Avenue in Garfield. “But it’s also one of those places where you don’t think of science. You’re gallery-hopping on the typical First Friday art walk, and suddenly you open this door and you’re in the middle of a collection of specimens of genetic engineering.”
The day of our interview was in January, cold and gray. That evening, Pitts planned to go with her class to see some public science across the street from the Cathedral—the live reptile exhibit at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. Her baby was going, too, a child born not long after Pitts began teaching here. With the living reptiles in dialogue with the reconstructed dinosaurs, the adult humans in dialogue with the preverbal child and each other—the rhetorical possibilities were no doubt endless on that winter's night.
—Ellen McGrath Smith