Position Title
Director of the University Writing Program
Chair for the DE in Writing, Rhetoric, and Composition Studies
Professor
Research Areas:
Biography:
Carl Whithaus is a Professor of Writing and Rhetoric at the University of California, Davis. His research areas include the impact of information technology on literacy practices, writing assessment, and writing in the sciences and engineering. His three books include Multimodal Literacies and Emerging Genres (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013), Writing Across Distances and Disciplines: Research and Pedagogy in Distributed Learning (Routledge, 2008) and Teaching and Evaluating Writing in the Age of Computers and High-Stakes Testing (Erlbaum, 2005).
He was Director of the University Writing Program from 2011 through 2018. He has also served on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) Planning Committee for 2011-2019 Writing Standards Framework, the editorial board for Kairos, and the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) Best Practices for Online Writing Instruction (OWI) Committee (2007-10). He has taught courses ranging from first-year writing to graduate-level classes in traditional, hybrid, and distance learning environments. His articles have appeared in Composition Studies, Technical Communication Quarterly, Kairos, Assessing Writing, and The Journal of Basic Writing. He has served as principal investigator for the journal Splash! milk science update since 2017 and as editor for the Journal of Writing Assessment since 2015.
His current research projects include: exploring potential modifications to microblogs to leverage knowledge produced "swarming" content/users, examining the relationships among claims and evidence in the writing of professional biologists and environmental scientists, "wayfinding" as a metaphor for writing development in early career professional writers, and procedural rhetorics in social media writing environments.
Carl earned his Ph.D. at the City University of New York (CUNY); he has taught at Stevens Institute of Technology, Old Dominion University, and the University of California, Davis.
- Writing Technologies; Digital Cultures; Writers and their Writing Processes; Science Writing, including Writing in Agriculture; Writing Assessment; Professional and Technical Writing;
- Multimodal Composition; Critical Pedagogy; the Pacific Rim (Writing and Globalization); Writing and RPGs; Rhetorics and Poetics; Histories of Books and Publishing