UMass Amherst Department of English to Re-launch Peter Elbow Symposium for the Study and Teaching of Writing

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AMHERST, Mass. – The composition and rhetoric faculty in the department of English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst have announced the re-launch of the Peter Elbow Symposium for the Study and Teaching of Writing, which will take place on the UMass Amherst campus June 18-21.

The symposium began in 1999 with a donation of $100,000 from professor Peter Elbow, who retired in 2000. Matched by $50,000 from the Commonwealth, the fund provides stipends for writing scholars and teachers from around the world to come to Amherst in the summer for a week-long symposium on a chosen topic. With Elbow’s retirement and subsequent move to Seattle, the symposium has been on hiatus for several years.

Recently, after much conversation among Elbow, the English department, the College of Humanities and Fine Arts and the UMass Foundation, the symposium was re-dedicated with fresh energy and enthusiasm. Its directorship has passed formally from Elbow to the composition and rhetoric faculty, who will jointly oversee it.

The first symposium in the new iteration of the project will be this summer on the theme “Transnational Approaches to Language, Literacy, and Activism.” Assistant professor Rebecca Lorimer Leonard will be directing; 11 leading scholars from around the country will join her, along with UMass Amherst composition and rhetoric faculty and graduate students, for a week of work and study.

For more information, visit www.umass.edu/english/peter-elbow-symposium-study-and-teaching-writing.