This site will be changing!

As you may have noticed, I have not updated this blog consistently in quite a long time. I believe very much in blogging, but as I’ve started my PhD coursework I find it hard to prioritize when there is so much else going on. As such, this summer I plan to transition this site to an archived blog and space for posting news, teaching materials, and the occasional quick thought. To kick off those kinds of entries, here’s a couple fresh updates.

1. Graduate Writing Award in Literacy, Pedagogy, and Rhetoric

One of the last things I posted was that I was heading to Penn State’s Camp Rhetoric with my rhetorical gestures project “The Case of the ‘Grace Face’: Gestures Toward a Theory of Embodied Genre.” Well, I was recently awarded my department’s prestigious writing award for that project. Needless to say I was shocked to learn that I’d won this important award in my first year, and extremely honored to join the incredible company of past winners, all of whom have had their pieces published. Just last week I got to speak about the process for my project at an incredible event celebrating graduate work in writing. The highlights of the event for me were my co-speakers, Mariolina Salvatori, who came back to speak of life/work intersections and her remarkable career, and Danielle Koupf, who spoke of textual reuse in dissertation projects. The whole evening made me feel so warmly about our program and community at Pitt. It was, as they say, a night to remember.

2. Conference on College Composition and Communication

March 19-22 I attended the Cs conference and was reunited with wonderful friends from all three of my other affiliated institutions and was welcomed into the community of Pitt-affiliated students, faculty, and alum with a happy hour-type gathering. We stayed with friends of my cohort-mate which was beyond lovely — to have a home instead of a conference hotel was great. The conference itself was quite good — I chose panels to attend well and learned, above all, that the conversations going on at Pitt and with/between my friends and peers are the conversations happening elsewhere as well. This is a good non-surprise. It was a productive conference, even though I didn’t get to attend the Research Network Forum as planned and even though we got a flat tire on the drive back to Pittsburgh. C’est la vie.

3. Materialities blogging

I’ve been blogging for my seminar in the Materialities of Writing with Prof. Annette Vee over on her site, here: http://www.annettevee.com/2014spring_materialitiesofwriting/ We’re all under pseudonyms, but I’ve been blogging as TABLET. See what you think — I’ve had a blast making and creating and thinking through the blog for this course (and have continued my OED definition titles).

For now, a “see you later”

I am looking forward to refreshing this site for its new purpose and figuring out how to at least microblog while I continue my coursework and start teaching again next year. In the meantime, you can follow me on Twitter @moriahlpurdy for near-daily updates, links, and things I’m thinking about. See you again soon.