J. Michael Rifenburg is a professor of rhetoric and composition and co-director of first-year composition at the University of North Georgia, Dahlonega campus where he teaches courses in rhetorical theory, intermediate composition, and first-year composition. He also serves as Senior Faculty Fellow for Scholarly Writing within UNG’s Center for Teaching, Learning, and Leadership.
After teaching high school literature, he received his MA from Auburn University; he received his Ph.D. from the University of Oklahoma where he worked as a program development coordinator in the athletics department and as a program assistant for the Writing Center. His work on the intersection of athletics and academia has appeared in, Composition Forum, Praxis: A Writing Center Journal, Teaching English in the Two-Year College, and the Writing Center Journal. These articles culminated in a book-length study of student-athlete literacy title The Embodied Playbook: Writing Practices of Student-Athletes (Utah State University Press, 2018).
Beyond college sports and literacy, Michael thinks broadly about writing, what writing is, and how it’s accomplished. With Patricia Portanova and Duane Roen, he edited the open access collection Contemporary Perspectives on Cognition and Writing (WAC Clearinghouse, 2017), which has notched over 32,000 pdf downloads and was nominated for NCTE’s David H. Russell Research Award.
His current research focuses on the writing practices within the U.S. Army, specifically U.S. Army senior cadet writing instruction. With an Army lieutenant colonel, he authored an article on conceptions’ cadets have of first-year composition classes published in Teaching & Learning Inquiry. And his study of writing within an Army brigade headquarters was recently published in Composition Studies. This research is culminating in a book project tentatively titled Drilled Write: Becoming a Cadet Writer at a Senior Military College; the manuscript is under-contract with University Press of Colorado.
On the national level, he is a reviewer for Composition Studies, The Writing Center Journal ,and the Queen City Writers, and serves as a faculty advising editor for Young Scholars in Writing. He also serves on the Newcomers’ Orientation Committee for the annual Conference on College Composition and Communication and helped revise the CCCC Guidelines for the Ethical Conduct of Research in Composition Studies. Born in New York and raised in Atlanta, Georgia, Michael briefly worked as a sports reporter for a daily paper before turning to his chosen field of rhetoric and composition.
His complete CV offers more details; follow Michael on twitter @JMRifenburg
J. Michael Rifenburg 