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[edit] Hawk, Byron

Byron Hawk is an Associate Professor of English at the University of South Carolina. Hawk’s scholarship has focused on the history of composition studies, new media composition, complexity theory, and posthumanism. Among other academics, Hawk’s work is informed by Gregory Ulmer and Gilles Deleuze.

[edit] Academic Career

Hawk has been an Associate Professor at the University of South Carolina since 2010. Prior to that, Hawk held Associate and Assistant professor positions at George Mason University and an Assistant Professor position at James Madison University.

Hawk has taught both undergraduate and graduate level classes including topics such as digital rhetoric, the rhetoric of popular music, technical writing and the history and historiography of composition.

Hawk earned a PhD in English with a Rhetoric/Composition and Critical Theory concentration from the University of Texas at Arlington in 2000. His dissertation director was Victor J. Vitanza.

[edit] Scholarship

Hawk’s scholarship ranges across disciplines, and his research interests include histories of theories of rhetoric, composition studies, new media technologies and the rhetoric of popular music.

In 2004, Hawk published "Toward a Rhetoric of Network (Media) Culture: Notes on Polarities and Potentiality" in a special issue of JAC that examined emerging network culture.

Also in 2004, Hawk published “Toward a Post-Techne-Or, Inventing Pedagogies for Professional Writing” in Technical Communication Quarterly. In this work, Hawk suggests extending posthuman and ecological theoretical perspectives beyond hardware and software applications and moving toward frameworks that include workplace and classroom contexts.

Hawk’s 2007 book A Counter-History of Composition: Toward Methodologies of Complexity contests a pervasive notion in composition studies that draws a strict distinction between rhetoric (advocated as rational and teachable) and vitalism (an expressive, innate, essentially unteachable process). In this reexamination of composition studies, Hawk argues for an approach to composition that includes complex vitalism in pedagogies as the field extends into new and emerging media.

Before the widespread use of blogs, Hawk also maintained a website (Bystory, last updated 2005) in which he combines personal, academic, and other interests. The Bystory website created a space for Hawk to work through Ulmer’s ideas in addition to grounding his pedagogical approach to digital rhetoric and composition.

[edit] Professional Activities

While a graduate student, Hawk founded the electronic journal Enculturation, a peer-reviewed journal of rhetoric, writing and culture which accepts conventional essays in addition to hypertext articles, videos, and other multimedia projects.

Hawk is the editor of the New Media Theory series published by Parlor Press. The series explores and critically examines the ecological and rhetorical contexts in both media and new media.

Hawk also serves as the Web Projects Review Editor for The Writing Instructor, an electronic journal and community of students and teachers of writing.

In 2006, Hawk co-edited, along with Cheryl Ball, a special issue of Computers and Composition Online titled “Sound in/as Compositional Space – A Next Step in Multiliteracies.”

[edit] Awards

A Counter-History of Composition won JAC's W. Ross Winterowd Award for the best book published on composition theory in 2007. The same text received honorable mention for MLA's Mina Shaughnessy Prize for outstanding research publication in the field of teaching English language in 2008.