Matthew Pavesich

director + teaching professor // university writing program // johns hopkins university

writing + rhetoric // writing program administration // public humanities

In 2021, I became the director of the University Writing Program in Johns Hopkins University’s Krieger School after ten years with Georgetown University's Writing Program. And while I continue to work on most of the projects below, my primary professional focus now turns to the most exciting and challenging project of my career: a ground-up reimagining of writing at JHU. In collaboration with new colleagues across campus, our team will tackle first-year writing, writing across the curriculum, co- and extra-curricular partnerships, and experiential learning and community engagement. I’ll no doubt depend on the lessons I wrote about with friend and colleague Sherry Linkon in our article on organic methods of program development.

Update, Fall 2023: Things are going well. Check out our new University Writing Program!

CURRENT + Recent Projects

DC/Adapters (2013 - )

DC/Adapters (dcadapters.org) is a photographic archive of adaptations to and uses of the flag of the District of Columbia. A study of how people all across the city use one of our most powerful and recognizable local symbols, this project documents a vibrant, local network of rhetorical activity.

My writing on DC/Adapters appears in technoculture and is forthcoming in an edited volume on the public humanities from Routledge (2024).

Covered by the Washington Post and part of the Humanities for All and Rhetorics for All collections.

DOWNLOADING STATEHOOD (2019)

A DC/Adapters film, Downloading Statehood encourages D.C. residents to adapt the flag in support of statehood for the District of Columbia.

Winner of the Beeck Center Award for Social Impact and Innovation and featured on Prince of Petworth's D.C. blog.

Writing Beyond the University (2019 - )

Originally funded by the Center for Engaged Learning (Elon University), our team of 5 researchers (Dana Driscoll, Andrea Efthymiou, Heather Lindenman, Jen Reid, and me) set out to study writing outside of traditional academic spaces. We focused on self-sponsored writing (writing outside of the context of work and school obligations) by asking what functions it serves for those who engage in it. With surveys of over 700 participants and nearly 30 interviews, we have now begun to publish on our findings. First was a chapter in the CEL’s open access book series (link). Forthcoming in 2024 is an article outlining our initial findings in Written Communication. Read more in the Center for Engaged Learning’s blog post about our work.

The State of the art (2018)

Organized and held in 2018 with Karen Shaup, the State of the Art (link) is a professional development experience for rhet/comp scholar-teachers in the Mid-Atlantic region. Designed to provoke and unsettle teaching and research practices through engagement with a carefully curated reading list, faculty work together to sharpen their next project or course design. The State of the Art was originally conceived as a biannual regional event, and I hope to return to it post-pandemic.

Public Humanities Officer (2024-2027)

In April 2024, I will start a term as the public humanities officer for the Rhetoric Society of America. Building on the leadership of Dave Tell (Kansas U.), we’ll continue to expand Rhetorics for All and begin to develop more public humanities programming for the society.

Teaching

In 2020, I won — with Maggie Debelius and Sherry Linkon — the Provost’s Innovation in Teaching Award at Georgetown University.

Teaching Statement

First-year writing courses should do two things: 1, disrupt what students think writing is and how they practice it, and 2, prepare students technically and dispositionally to adapt to diverse writing situations throughout their careers and lives (adapted from Downs/Robertson in Naming What We Know). In general, my FYW courses aim to be high-impact experiences.
Recently, students in an experimental course designed escape rooms for the purposes of research instruction and source evaluation in a university library, and, in another, students conducted semester-long inquiry into specific, place-based concerns, mapped the discourses of these concerns, and wrote in a variety of genres to publicly intervene in local issues. I’ve also experimented recently with design-oriented, client-based writing courses, as well as other community-engaged models.
In my courses on the public humanities, we explore possible answers to 2 questions: what do the humanities offer to public life, and how are we equipped for public life by training in the humanities? Through readings, investigation of organizations and projects, and informational interviews, students build a sense of the current landscape of the public humanities, and then turn to inventing new ways to articulate their place/s in that landscape through projects of their own design.
I also re-designed and taught Georgetown's English M.A. digital capstone seminar, the program’s thesis-alternative, incorporating the design methods I’ve published on in enculturation. The seminar, intended to guide students as they work with individual faculty mentors, functions as a semester-long design exercise in which students identify and create the core goals, audiences, and rhetorical strategies of digital projects.
Public Writing
The Teaching Writing Workshop
Introduction to Rhetoric
Studio in Design and Communication