Composition Studies

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Composition Studies

✍️Teaching-centered scholarship in composition & rhetoric.
📚Independent, peer-reviewed since 1972.
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The oldest independent periodical in its field, Composition Studies is an academic journal dedicated to the range of professional practices associated with rhetoric and composition: teaching college writing; theorizing rhetoric and composing; administering writing related programs; preparing the field's future teacher-scholars. All perspectives and topics of general interest to the profession are welcome.

08/31/2026

When Seth E. Davis interviewed for a job at LeMoyne-Owen College, an oil portrait of Dr. Juanita V. Williamson presided over the conference table. He had never heard of her. His first questions were simple: Who is this? What did she do to deserve an archive?

Davis, a Black q***r literacy scholar, recognizes himself in this forgetting. "I also think part of me wrote off the contributions of HBCU professors myself," he writes. The assumption reads differently now that he teaches a 6/6 load while trying to publish with limited resources.

Williamson had been challenging assumptions about race, region, and language well before the field adopted Students' Right to Their Own Language in 1974. Her position was controversial, in Davis's word. He describes her leaning away from prescriptive styles of teaching writing toward descriptive ones while still teaching standard English, and being ardently against the 1974 adoption of the resolution, which she believed would inherently disenfranchise non-standard speech styles.

Davis describes her work as accessible without necessarily being appreciated. Baddour also told him that in 2013 Williamson's archives were set to be discarded before LeMoyne-Owen professors Dr. Juanita Bass and Dr. Charles "Brownie" Moore saved them.

Davis understands his own recovery work through Black feminist q***r literacies of memory: q***r ancestry, chosen family, and reclamation. What he describes is an intellectual kinship. "Frankly," he writes, "the shared experience of being Black and leaving Memphis to attend graduate school at a PWI in the Midwest almost makes us blood related." He often sees himself, he writes, as her "distant nephew doing work on campus."

He calls recovery and reclamation a q***r composition practice, and returns to Memphis asking for more stories of day-to-day life, beyond the big names and familiar headlines.

Whose work in your corner of the field should more of us know?

Read the full article: https://bit.ly/54-1_12

***rComposition

08/28/2026

Six colleagues sent Joshua Barsczewski some version of the same professional obituary: the college essay is dead.

His response is not exactly mourning.

In “Q***ring Composition after Gen AI,” Barsczewski begins with something large language models do remarkably well: produce statistically probable language. That makes them particularly adept at reproducing familiar academic genres, moves, and prose styles.

And that raises a more interesting question than how to keep students from using AI: what have our assignments been rewarding all along?

Q***r composition has been asking versions of that question for decades. If academic success depends on reproducing recognizable forms and normative expectations, Gen AI may be exposing a problem that predates the technology.

Barsczewski’s alternative is not an AI-proof assignment. It’s a more expansive sense of what writing might do: genre refusal, embodied and performative writing, hybrid multimodal texts, collaborative composition. Not novelty for its own sake, but writing that makes the rules themselves available for reconsideration.

Or, as he puts it: perhaps it’s time to cultivate the improbable.

Where does your assignment reward coloring inside the lines?

***rComposition

08/26/2026

Penguins. Generative AI. A Memphis archive.

In 54.1’s Where We Are, six scholars take up the present and future of q***r composition—and arrive by very different routes. Joshua Barsczewski turns toward the improbable. Seth E. Davis looks to recovery and the archive. Erin Green asks what theory is for when q***r and trans scholarship is under attack. Violet Livingston brings Octavia Butler into the writing classroom. Timothy Oleksiak considers how q***rness gets composed into the world. And Rachel Robinson-Zetzer returns to questions that have followed the field for decades.

We’ll spend the next few weeks reading each response more closely. For now, consider these six places to start.

Which line are you still thinking about?

***rComposition ***rRhetorics

08/24/2026

In 54.1, Where We Are turns to the present and future of q***r composition.

Jonathan Alexander and Jacqueline Rhodes published “Q***r: An Impossible Subject for Composition” in JAC in 2011. Fifteen years later, editors Zachary Beare and Jacob Babb return to that essay with five questions for six scholars: Joshua Barsczewski, Seth E. Davis, Erin Green, Violet Livingston, Timothy Oleksiak, and Rachel Robinson-Zetzer.

The questions range widely: how q***r composition has changed and where it might go; what makes the work riskier now; what new technologies are changing; whose voices the field has left out; and what q***rness asks us to reconsider about rhetoric itself.

The answers range wider still—through generative AI, place and memory, precarity and q***r life, classrooms and pedagogy, genre, pleasure, refusal, and the possibilities of composing otherwise.

Over the next few weeks, we’ll spend time with each of the six responses.

Which of the editors’ five questions would you want to answer?

***rComposition ***rRhetorics

08/19/2026

Twenty-three pieces in 54.1. You probably aren't reading all twenty-three this afternoon.

So instead of sorting the issue by section—articles, course designs, Where We Are, reviews—we built four reading paths around ideas that keep coming up across it.

01 – What happens when the facts are there, but they don’t settle anything?

02 – How do you know whether changing the grading changed the learning?

03 – Why do assignments asking for surprising writing keep producing the expected?

04 – And what happens when what students know isn’t always called literacy?

Each path puts pieces from different parts of the issue into conversation with one another.

And not everything fits on the map. Seven pieces sit outside these routes—including work by Angela Laflen and Rachel Robinson-Zetzer, four book reviews, and Beare and Babb’s open-access introduction.

Twenty-three pieces, four paths, with plenty left to find.

08/15/2026

Course designs at Composition Studies now go through peer review.

The change started with something the editors kept hearing from prospective authors: I want to submit one, but I need the publication to count.

Course Designs are more than teaching tips. They publish the materials and thinking behind courses people have actually built and taught—the institutional context, theoretical rationale, assignments, syllabi, and other pieces that make a pedagogy portable. Zachary Beare and Jacob Babb describe them as interventions designed to address timely pedagogical needs.

But without peer review, that work could be difficult to recognize within the systems that still shape academic careers. As Beare and Babb put it, a course design “wouldn’t be ‘countable’ in the way that faculty often need their publications to be for promotion and tenure purposes.”

“If only we knew some people who could introduce some kind of policy change to address that concern. Oh, wait. That’s us.”

So they did.

In consultation with the Advisory Board, Course Designs will now go through peer review. Beare and Babb are also candid about what that change costs: more editorial labor and more pressure on reviewers who are already doing a great deal of invisible work.

They think it is worth it.

Peer review doesn’t make the work scholarly. It removes one barrier to having it recognized that way.

08/12/2026

Academic publishing has a problem, and Composition Studies is part of it. Too much scholarship in this field sits behind a paywall or an institutional login, and Zachary Beare and Jacob Babb say so about their own journal in the opening pages of 54.1: it “is not as accessible as we might sometimes want it to be.”

They get at the problem sideways, through a book format that’s currently disappearing. In 2006, the year before the Kindle, about 103 million mass market paperbacks sold in the United States. Last year, fewer than 18 million.

The paperback wasn’t only cheap. It was easy to circulate. Paula Rabinowitz, professor emerita at Minnesota, told The Guardian that a quarter bought a book you could own and carry, which meant “you might give a book to a friend and pass it on.” Access wasn’t only about getting the book. It was about what you could do with it once you had it.

So, what would it mean to make scholarship easier to pass on?

In 54.1, that means the editors’ introduction, At a Glance, all six Where We Are essays, both course designs, and all seven book reviews are open access. Every issue also carries at least one open article; this time it’s Erika Luckert’s, a study of four years of her own student evaluations of teaching and what they taught her about contract grading.

None of that fixes academic publishing. It does mean a good part of this issue is something you can send to someone tonight.

Read 54.1 now at: https://bit.ly/54-1

What scholarship have you been able to pass on because someone made it accessible?

08/08/2026

Composition Studies 54.1 is finished. Before the issue goes live, here’s the map.

Beare and Babb begin with a technology that’s disappearing rather than arriving: the mass-market paperback and what its slow exit makes visible about access, affordability, and who gets to read.

Across the articles, assessment keeps returning in different forms. Erika Luckert reads four years of her own student evaluations from a contract-graded classroom. Jennifer Seibel Trainor and John Holland follow six years of program assessment and its effects on minoritized students. Michael J. Zerbe asks what empirical writing assessment can claim about validity when the sciences themselves are still arguing about it.

Where We Are gathers six scholars around the present and future of q***r composition. The responses move from Gen AI to the firing of a trans graduate instructor in Oklahoma; from teaching Octavia Butler to Timothy Oleksiak beginning with his own wedding. They don’t arrive at the question from the same place—or answer it in the same register.

Elsewhere in the issue: two course designs, seven book reviews, and one week of a student’s digital composing life made visible as data.

We’ll spend the next few months taking 54.1 one piece at a time.

Save this for when the issue hits your inbox.

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