Matthew Pavesich

Matthew Pavesich

Director + Teaching Professor

mpavesi2@jhu.edu
12 Gilman Hall
Personal Website

Matthew Pavesich arrived as director of the program in the fall of 2021. He specializes in the teaching of writing, writing program administration, and the public humanities. 

His current projects include a large-scale study of self-sponsored writing, or what people write beyond the requirements of work or school; and DC/Adapters, a photographic archive of local visual rhetoric. He also serves on a national committee devoted to the cultivation of public humanities with the Rhetoric Society of America and on the editorial board of the Journal of Basic Writing.

Before coming to Hopkins, Pavesich taught for ten years at Georgetown University, where he received the Provost’s Innovation in Teaching Award in 2020. His courses include innovative models for first-year writing, collaborative teaching in the disciplines, introductions to and advanced courses in rhetoric, and graduate courses in the teaching of writing and the public and digital humanities. His work has appeared in enculturation, the WAC Journal, Technoculture, The Journal of Basic Writing, and several edited volumes. Pavesich did his doctoral work in English, specializing in rhetoric at the University of Illinois-Chicago (2009). 

Peer-Reviewed Publications 

“Looking for Trouble: Threshold Concepts of Research.” Revised and resubmitted to College Composition and Communication. With Karen L. Shaup (2021). 

“Failing Forward: Writing, Design, and Organic Curricular Change at Georgetown University,” Redesigning Liberal Education: Innovative Design for a Twenty-First Century Undergraduate Education. Eds. William Moner, Philip Motley, and Rebecca Pope-Ruark. Johns Hopkins U.P. With Margaret Debelius and Sherry Lee Linkon (2020). 

“Learning as Coordination: Postpedagogy + Design,” enculturation (2019). With Steph Ceraso. 

“For More Than Display: D.C.’s Adaptable Flag,” Washington History: A Publication of the Historical Society of Washington, D.C. 30.2 (Fall 2018). 

“An Affordance Approach to WAC Sustainability and Development,” The WAC Journal 26 (Fall 2015): 22-35. With Sherry Lee Linkon. 

“Field Notes on Activist Objects,” Technoculture 4 (2014). 

“Reflecting on the Liberal Reflex: Rhetoric and the Politics of Acknowledgement in Basic Writing,” Journal of Basic Writing 30.2 (2011): 84-109. 

  • (Re-printed in Parlor Press’ yearly volume The Best of the Independent Rhetoric and Composition Journals)