People
Center Graduate Students: Pamela Saunders
Pamela Saunders is a Ph.D. student in English and the Center for Writing Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Contact Information
220 English Building | MC-718 saundrs2@illinois.edu
Biographical Statement
I was born and raised in San Diego, CA, but moved to Seattle, WA for college. I completed two BA degrees – one in Music (flute performance), one in English – at the University of Washington in 2010, after which I moved to Illinois to begin my graduate studies at UIUC. Like many others, I first became interested in writing studies while working as a consultant and later an assistant director at an on-campus writing center for four years as an undergraduate. It wasn’t until graduate school that I became interested in conversations happening at the intersection of writing studies and disability studies. My current research project consists of qualitative interviews with autistic students about their lived experiences as writers both in and out of the writing classroom and with navigating higher education as students on the spectrum.
Research Interests
Disability, autism, neurorhetorics, cognition and composition studies, rhetoric of science, technology, and medicine, normativity, embodiment, ethnography