People
Center Graduate Students: Vanessa Rouillon
Vanessa Rouillon is a Ph.D. candidate in the Center for Writing Studies in the English Department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Contact Information
Center for Writing Studies
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
608 South Wright Street
Urbana, IL 61801 (MC 205)
vrouill2@illinois.edu
Biographical Statement
I'm a doctoral candidate in English, with a specialization in Writing Studies, completing my dissertation on African American rhetorical education in the early twentieth century. My dissertation, “Reconfiguring Racial Uplift: Church-sponsored African American Educational, Rhetorical, and Archival Work in the Early Twentieth Century” studies how members of African American communities, specifically members of Bethel AME Church, engaged in self-sponsored rhetoric locally, during the Interwar period, to demonstrate their educational, literary, and archival pursuits and to assert their citizenship. Central to my research is the compilation of archival records, which I have been depositing in Bethel to reconstruct both their library and early rhetorical history. I have an MA degree in Economics (Georgetown University), and a MA in Teaching English as a Second Language (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign). I have extensive experience teaching Academic Writing for ESL and freshman students at the University of Illinois. As a writing consultant at our campus writing center, the Writers Workshop, not only have I tutored multiple writers (ESL, undergraduate and graduate, in the Humanities, Sciences, and Social Sciences), but I have also conducted personal statement workshops, organized graduate student writing groups, and visited campus units introducing our writing center philosophies. I have transposed these beliefs (sharing, discussing, and revising of writing) to my teaching in Danville Correctional Center, as Writing Instructor for the Education Justice Project at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Research Interests
African American rhetorics, visual rhetoric, histories of rhetoric and composition, oral histories, archival methodologies, ethnographic methods, writing centers, teacher education, and prison education