Dr. David Grant

I received my Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin - Madison, an M.A. from Northern Arizona University, and a B.A. from Winona State University. Both my Ph.D. and M.A. are in composition and rhetoric, while my B.A. is in Literature with a writing emphasis. In addition to Madison, Flagstaff, and Winona, I have lived in Waseca and St. Paul in Minnesota as well as Tampa, Florida. I currently enjoy Cedar Falls where I live with my wife, Jessica, and our two children, Solon and Ruby. In addition to a career in academia, I have worked for environmental change with Greenpeace, organic farming, and prairie restoration.

My experiences in many different places has led me to explore connections between place, nature and writing. My current research interests concern the ways writing and invention are connected to environments and bound up in ecological systems. I am currently writing a chapter for an edited collection, Writing the Earth: Rhetorics and Literacies of Sustainability. My other project, a book-length manuscript, looks at several student journals written during a thirteen-day field experience studying Lakota culture around Pine Ridge and the Black Hills. These journals point toward the role of place in invention through the concept of chora, or a potentially traumatic inability of our systems of representation to ever capture and contain the experience of being in a place. Still, as ecological beings, we are connected to our environments through our bodies and our culture. Confluences between the material and discursive hold "affordances" for activity like invention, even though the outcome of that activity is marked by contingency and indeterminancy

I currently teach several writing courses within the English Department as well as Native American Rhetoric and Literature. I hope to bring perspectives informed by critical theory and classical rhetoric to the UNI curriculum and Writing Programs.