Rebecca Lorimer Leonard
Professor and Associate Graduate Program Director
Faculty Bio
Rebecca Lorimer Leonard’s research develops theories about how writing practices move across linguistic and geographic boundaries, using qualitative methods to shift understandings of writing away from multilingual writers’ failings and toward their existing and future literate expertise.
Professor Lorimer Leonard is currently completing a monograph that revises and extends her concept of “literacy relays” from her first book, Writing on the Move. Based on six years of community-engaged research, the new book, Literacy Relays: Heritage Literacy in Multilingual Families, demonstrates the mobile, embodied, and transformative literacies that run through multilingual families’ generations.
Her past scholarship includes research on critical language awareness (College English, Journal of Second Language Writing); the transfer of writing knowledge (Writing Knowledge Transfer; College Composition and Communication, College English); language identities and institutional surveys (Journal of Language, Identity & Education); and the literate practices of multilingual migrant writers (Mobility Work in Composition, Written Communication, College English, Research in the Teaching of English). Professor Lorimer Leonard’s monograph, Writing on the Move: Migrant Women and the Value of Literacy, won the 2019 Outstanding Book Award from the Conference on College Composition and Communication and an Honorable Mention for the 2018 Outstanding Book Award from CFSHRC. Her co-written article, “Relationality in Writing Transfer Research,” won a 2023 Best Article Award from the Association for Writing Across the Curriculum.
Professor Lorimer Leonard teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on language ideologies, literacy studies, writing pedagogy, and research methods. Professor Lorimer Leonard received the Outstanding Teaching Award from the College of Humanities and Fine Arts in 2017, the Distinguished Teaching Award from UMass Amherst in 2023, and the Distinguished Community Engaged Research Award from UMass in 2026.
You can read more about her work at her website.
Research Areas
- Composition and Rhetoric
- Nonfiction Writing