Welcome to our new Archivists & Historians!

The Coalition is pleased to announce the appointments of Michael Healy and Michelle Smith to the role of Archivist and Historian! We are thrilled to gain their support and expertise as we expand, diversify, and publicize our digital and physical archival holdings while also ensuring that those holdings are searchable and accessible to a broad swath of scholars and researchers.

Michael Healy completed his dissertation, Tracing Techne: Distributed Histories of Invention, Creativity, and Text-Technologies in Rhetoric and Composition Scholarship from the 1990s, at Florida State University in 2021 and, this fall, begins a position at Western Kentucky University. Michael’s background in online archiving and digital curation includes serving as a research fellow for FSU’s Linked Women’s Pedagogues Project. As a research fellow, Michael gathered and curated data and metadata highlighting women’s pedagogical and intellectual labor. Additionally, during his time at FSU, Michael served as a graduate co-administrator for the Museum of Everyday Writing, an online archive that he helped develop and maintain while also collaborating with undergraduate interns on the curation of artifacts and exhibits for the museum.

Michelle Smith joins us from Clemson University where she is an Assistant Professor of English. Michelle brings passion for archival research and experience as an archival researcher to the position, as her publications engage archives ranging from the Kenneth Burke archives at Penn State University to the National Archives in D.C. In addition, her 2021 book, Utopian Genderscapes: Rhetorics of Women’s Work in the Early Industrial Age (Southern Illinois UP), draws heavily on the archival records of three nineteenth-century utopian communities. Her exceptional archival work earned the book an honorable mention for the Coalition’s 2022 Winifred Bryan Horner Outstanding Book Award.

Welcome, Michael and Michelle!!

Effusive thanks are due to outgoing Archivist and Historian, Alexis Ramsey-Tobienne. Alexis served for six years as the Coalition’s inaugural Archivist and Historian and was instrumental in collecting, sorting, and launching an online, searchable archive of administrative records and scholarship from the Coalition, including items related to our annual “Wednesday Evening Event” at CCCC, the biennial Feminisms & Rhetorics conference, and CFSHRC’s journal, Peitho. Alexis also chaired the search committee that identified her successors. THANK YOU, Alexis, for your foundational work on our archives and your dedication to ensuring their future!

Thanks are also due to the other members of the Archivist and Historian Search Committee, Tarez Samra Graban, Rebecca Dingo, and Jen Almjeld. Your efforts on the Coalition’s behalf are greatly appreciated!