The Institute for Writing and Rhetoric is delighted to announce that Professor Christiane Donahue will begin her tenure as Director of the IWR on September 1. According to Donahue, her goals for the Institute include “supporting the excellent work in place at Dartmouth, exploring new ways to extend that work, supporting the expansion of writing and rhetoric instruction across students’ Dartmouth careers, and collaboratively implementing assessment of students’ progress.” Donahue will also be teaching a section of Writing 5 in winter term 2009, about the ownership of creativity and originality.
Christiane Donahue has been working in higher education across the cultures of France and the United States since the 1980s. She began her interest in writing and teaching writing as an undergraduate writing tutor at Northeastern University in 1981, pursued a BA degree in English and Education with plans to teach high school, and then was drawn to studying writing through the lens of linguistics and discourse analysis for an MA in Linguistics and Writing. Donahue began collaborating with French teachers and scholars during these years, beginning with a Whiting Foundation fellowship supporting a research trip that became the grounds for her doctoral work in French functional linguistics and discourse analysis at l’Université de Paris V. While in France, she found herself drawn to the work of Frédéric François, who ended up being her thesis director.
During these years, as she taught writing, carried out program development, and directed programs working with colleagues in composition and across the disciplines, Donahue was inspired by composition theory and composition-rhetoric work and saw the possibility for highly fruitful interaction between this field and her other work. At the same time she traveled frequently back and forth between France and the United States. Donahue reports that one of the nicest parts of doing a Ph.D. in France was the fact that she could say, “Well, I just have to go to France again this year…”
Donahue continues to collaborate extensively with colleagues in France, as well as in Germany, Brussels, the UK, Switzerland, and Canada. She belongs to the THEODILE research group (Théorie et didactique de la lecture-écriture) at the Université de Lille III and is an associated member of the CRIE research group (Centre de recherche sur l'intervention éducative) at the Université de Sherbrooke.
More recently, Donahue has been enjoying the beautiful setting of the University of Maine-Farmington, Maine’s public liberal arts college, while continuing to pursue her research and teaching interests, guiding the development of a powerful first-year sequence of writing seminars and first-year seminars, and fostering work on writing across the disciplines through faculty development, assessment, and research activities.
As one might imagine, Donahue is a prolific researcher. Her recent publications in English include:
Finally, Donahue has been awarded a research Fulbright for the France-Nord Pas de Calais region for next year. She expects that this Fulbright will be a terrific “next step” in her French research.
The Institute extends its warmest welcome to Christiane Donahue.
