Local Professor’s Book Explores Teaching English in a Digital Age

Ohio State English professor Catherine Braun recently published a new book entitled, Cultivating Ecologies for Digital Media Work: The Case of English Studies.

This 240 page paperback, published December 2013 by Southern Illinois University Press, looks at the onslaught of the digital age and how it has rapidly redefined the parameters of virtually every aspect of daily life, including the world of academic scholarship.  Braun’s in-depth study documents English professors and the challenges they face in both career and classroom as they attempt to gain appropriate value for digital teaching and creation within their field, departments, and institutions.  In Cultivating Ecologies for Digital Media Work, Braun calls for a shift in thinking about the professional methods and digital goals of the English studies discipline and its central texts.

She analyzes how the new age of digital scholarship not only complements the traditional values of the English studies discipline but also offers constructive challenges to old ideas about texts, methods, and knowledge production. Cultivating Ecologies for Digital Media Work is the first volume to offer specific examination of the digital shift’s impact on English studies and provides the scaffold upon which productive conversations about the future of the field and digital pedagogy can be built.

Catherine C. Braun is an associate professor of English at the Ohio State University at Marion, where she teaches courses in digital media, professional writing, composition, and film studies, and has served as the coordinator of the professional writing minor and as a writing program administrator. She has published several articles on writing and technology.  Her research concentrations include: digital media studies; literacy studies, including digital/electronic/media literacies; computer-mediated communication and pedagogy; composition history, theory, and practice; rhetorical history, theory, and practice, including visual rhetoric, and rhetoric of technology.