Welcome to Drs. Toliver and Wang, Watson Visiting Professors
Spring 2025 Distinguished Watson Visiting Professors
This semester, the Watson Endowment on Rhetoric and Composition will sponsor visits from two visiting scholars, Dr. Stephanie Toliver and Dr. Xiqiao Wang. Drs. Toliver and Wang will each give a public lecture or workshop (March 18 and April 15, respectively, times TBD), co-teach a session of Dr. Olinger's English 688 graduate seminar on Mondays from 1-3:45 pm, and gather with graduate students and faculty for meals. Stay tuned for more details and meal sign-ups.
Dr. Stephanie ToliverAssistant Professor of Curriculum and Instruction Stephanie R. Toliver is an Assistant Professor of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In her research, Toliver employs creativity and imagination as tools to confront systemic inequities and promote more equitable education environments. Specifically, her scholarship focuses on three main areas: (1) investigating Black storytelling as a mechanism of social critique and transformation; (2) examining the applicability of speculative fiction (i.e., science fiction, horror, fantasy, etc.) as a tool to assist Black youth in articulating and challenging social injustice; and (3) exploring the use of creative and arts-based literacy pedagogies to help pre-service English teachers develop strategies to address racial injustice in their future classrooms. She is the author of the award-winning book, Recovering Black Storytelling in Qualitative Research: Endarkened Storywork, and her academic work has been published in several journals, including Equity, Excellence, & Education; Journal of Literacy Research; and Teachers College Record. Her public scholarship has been featured in the Chicago Tribune, Ms. Magazine, and Visible Magazine.
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Dr. Xiqiao WangAssistant Professor of English Xiqiao Wang is an assistant professor in the University of Pittsburgh’s Composition, Literacy, Pedagogy, and Rhetoric program. She received her PhD in Language, Literacy, and Culture from Vanderbilt University and her MA in Rhetoric and Composition from University of South Florida. Before arriving at Pitt, Xiqiao taught in the Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures at Michigan State University. Xiqiao’s research program is grounded in an interdisciplinary framework informed by socio-cultural theories of literacy, translingualism, and literacy mobility theories. Her research has examined the changing forms and functions of composition in the broader context of global migration, multilingual and multimodal writing processes across formal, informal, and digital contexts, and best practices in designing translingual and multimodal pedagogy to support diverse learners. Her monograph, Multilingual writing in entanglement: Becoming with others through chronotopic figuring and unpredictable encounters, is contracted with Utah State University Press and develops theoretical and methodological tools for exploring the ephemeral, messy, and unpredictable features of multilingual writing. Her research has also appeared in a co-authored book entitled Inventing the World Grant University: Chinese International Students' Mobilities, Literacies and Identities, as well as professional journals such as Research in the Teaching of English, College Composition and Communication, Journal of Second Language Writing, Computers and Composition, Language and Education, Journal of Basic Writing, Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy among others. Her research has been supported by grants, such as the College Composition and Communication Research Initiative in 2014 and the Fulbright Specialist Program in 2018. |