We are pleased to welcome Kara Wittman to the UC Berkeley Department of English as an Associate Teaching Professor.
Professor Wittman studies and teaches in two sometimes-related fields: the history and theory of the essay; and critical pedagogy, especially pedagogies of writing, rhetoric, and literature. She is also interested in cross-disciplinary scholarship on the essay form: she’s currently working with a visual anthropologist and filmmaker at Pomona College on a project about the photographic essays sponsored by the U.S. Farm Security Administration in the first half of the twentieth century. Her work on the essay appears in the Cambridge History of the British Essay, the Edinburgh Companion to the Essay, Workplace: a Journal of Academic Labor, and elsewhere. She is the editor, with Evan Kindley, of the Cambridge Companion to the Essay (Cambridge, 2022).
Professor Wittman comes to Berkeley from Pomona College, where she served as Director of College Writing and Assistant Professor of English. At Pomona she won a major grant from the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations to build the Center for Speaking, Writing, and the Image, a cross-disciplinary center dedicated to peer mentorship and collaboration, inclusive pedagogy, language justice, and critical-rhetorical education at the intersection of the literacies: written, oral, and visual communication. Her published work on teaching, writing, and rhetoric covers such topics as plagiarism and the fascination with originality in academic writing, the politics of clarity, and “small” forms of communication: phatic utterances, marginal comments, and noticing. She’s working on a collaborative book project provisionally titled “Things We Already Knew: Metacognition as a Way to Learn, Belong, and Care in the First-Year Writing Classroom.”
She also writes about clouds, and talking birds.