Kelly Ritter

Kelly Ritter is Professor of Writing and Communication and Chair of the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She received her PhD in English from the University of Illinois-Chicago, her MFA in Poetry Writing from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and her BA in English and Communication Studies from the University of Iowa. Prior to Georgia Tech, she was on faculty at four other universities, including most recently the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where she served as Interim Chair of the Department of Philosophy (2021-2022), Associate Dean of Liberal Arts and Sciences (2017-21), Provost Fellow for Undergraduate Education (2016-17), Interim Director of the Center for Writing Studies (2014-15), and Director of Undergraduate Rhetoric (2013-17). Her scholarship focuses on archival histories of U.S. writing programs and pedagogies, and the impact of cultural-historical conceptions of social class on literacy education. She is the author or editor of nine books and numerous articles and chapters. From 2012 to 2017, she was editor of College English, a flagship journal of the National Council of Teachers of English.