Graduate Students form the Department of English:

Kyle Alvey (Ph.D. Student)
I am interested in how sci-fi authors like Isaac Asimov, Philip K. Dick, Octavia Butler, and Arthur Clarke (to name a few) have depicted artificial intelligences, particularly in their relation to human beings and creativity, as well as depictions of AI in film, such as Hal in 2001: A Space Odyssey and Colossus. I believe we are at a critical time when it comes to defining authorship, originality, and creativity, so part of my research interests concerns the necessary steps it will take to keep literary studies prevalent in a rapidly changing world. I am assisting Prof. Bob Marzec in his research for a project on an introduction to AI literary studies and will be submitting an essay I wrote on AI, literary depictions of AI, and Foucault's notion of the "author function" to reputable journals next academic year. 

Mark Griffin (Ph.D. Student)
An area of my research explores how technologies such as GenAI disrupt and reshape rhetorical production. I examine how GenAI’s user-friendly design obscures crucial aspects of the composing process and, in doing so, complicates student authorship and agency specifically and composition pedagogy more broadly. In response, I investigate how human-centered design and design thinking offer rhetorical frameworks for ethically integrating GenAI into our historically evolving composition practices.

Juan Carlos Montoya Lopez (Ph.D. Student)
As an emerging multilingual scholar in rhetoric, composition, and writing studies, I approach post-AI digital technologies as central to my research on writing centers and multilingual and Latine writers’ literacies. I examine not only the conflicts and disruptions these technologies bring to writing center work, but also the paradigm-shifting opportunities they offer writing program administrators, tutors, and writers. Central to this inquiry is the concept of authorship, which I understand as a challenge to cognitive, rationalist, individualist, anthropocentric, and neutral perspectives on writing and publication. I conceptualize authorship as a collective, pluralist, political, and posthuman practice of knowledge construction and dissemination. I am particularly interested in how post-AI technologies reshape authorship in an academic context that demands interdisciplinarity, collaboration, and continuous publication. While these pressures affect all writers in academia, they are especially significant for multilingual and Latine writers, who must also navigate language standards and cultural conventions often unfamiliar for them to pass gatekeepers and their voices and work to be recognized. My research explores the pluriversal literacies of these writers, including how AI technologies become part of their practices, not only because of their pervasiveness, but also because of multilingual and Latine writers’ cultural wealth leading them to appropriate available tools to navigate academic spaces in which they are often positioned as outsiders.