With funding from the Peter Elbow Symposium for the Study and Teaching of Writing, the UMass Amherst Composition and Rhetoric program welcomed Dr. Dorell Thomas, lecturer in composition at Brooklyn College, for a day-long visit on December 8, 2023.
Dr. Thomas earned his PhD in English Education from Columbia University in 2019; he also has master’s degrees in Literary Studies and in Adolescent English Education, Grades 7-12, from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Hunter College (CUNY), respectively. Since defending his dissertation, Dr. Thomas has developed a wide-ranging research agenda, which includes writing workshop pedagogy, book history, and the post-colonial reach of English instruction. He has presented his work at such national conferences as NCTE, CCCC, and AERA. In September 2021, he published “Beyond Disciplinary Drama: Federal Dollars, ESL Instruction for African Americans, and Public Memory” in College Composition and Communication. CCCC also awarded him a 2020-2021 CCCC/TYCA Editorial Fellowship. More recently, the Milton Society invited Dorell to present at MLA 2024.
Dr. Thomas’ talk was titled, “Placing Black Students Among Contending Factions in the University”; it is summarized in the following abstract: “Framing native-born Black Americans as foreign language students is largely not part of the shared public memory in composition. Dorell Thomas’ work-in-progress situates this erasure in the larger context of contending factions at a public university in the 1960s. The University of Wisconsin Madison was the site of widespread interrelated protest, which pitted conservative senior faculty against some junior faculty and newly unionized graduate teaching assistants. Increasingly, Black students asserted themselves later in the 1960s on campus, largely because their enrollment increased. In 1968, one English Department chair used Paradise Lost to frame the political climate on campus. His reading of John Milton’s poem raises larger questions about not just Satan’s punishment in the poem, but also how the university would respond to student challenges to its authority.”
In addition to the talk, Dr. Thomas spent time working with Prof. David Fleming on their shared research interest in the history of English Studies at UW-Madison. And he had lunch with several graduate students.