Rebecca Lorimer Leonard

Rebecca Lorimer Leonard has been on the faculty of UMass Amherst’s English Department since 2012. She holds a Ph.D. in English from the program in composition and rhetoric at the University of Wisconsin-Madison an MA in English from San Francisco State University and a BA in English from the University of Southern California. Her research is situated at the intersection of literacy studies, multilingual writing, and language ideologies. 

Professor Lorimer Leonard is currently completing a monograph that revises and extends her theory 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 (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 Winifred Bryan Horner Outstanding Book Award from the Coalition of Feminist Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition. Her College Composition and Communication article, co-written with colleagues Angela Rounsaville and Rebecca Nowacek, won a 2023 Best Article Award from the Association for Writing Across the Curriculum.

Professor Lorimer Leonard teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on language diversity, literacy studies, writing pedagogy, and research methods. She served as Writing Center Director from 2012-2016 and Writing Program Director from 2020-2022. Professor Lorimer Leonard received the Outstanding Teaching Award from the College of Humanities and Fine Arts in 2017 and the Distinguished Teaching Award from UMass Amherst in 2023.

You can read more about her work at her website.

• Colonial, Postcolonial, & Transnational
• Composition and Rhetoric