Kristi Girdharry

Kristi Girdharry is the Director of the Writing Center and an Associate Teaching Professor of English in the Arts and Humanities division where she teaches courses on writing, tutoring, and social media. Previously, she was an Assistant Professor of English at Johnson & Wales University where she also taught courses on communication skills and advanced research methods. She holds a PhD in English with a focus in Rhetoric and Composition from Northeastern University. Much of her scholarly and pedagogical interests come from work with community sites and partners. Stemming from her role in the creation of an oral history project and digital archive built to capture the ephemera following the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings, her dissertation—“Composing Digital Community Spaces: Design and Literacy Practices in/of the Archive”—offered a case study of a crowdsourced archive meant to simultaneously memorialize and historicize the events. She has published and given talks on aspects of this work ranging from understanding who participates in these types of story-sharing spaces to examining the linguistic practices of such story sharers, which show interesting markers of race, class, and inclusion/exclusion. In addition to also working on scholarship related to teaching and tutoring, she is a co-editor for the Best of the Journals in Rhetoric and Composition Series, which offers a current snapshot of the exigent themes, trends, and ideas within Writing Studies and also contextualizes each piece with activities and discussion questions to help aid in professional development conversations for instructors who may not have the means or time to attend the conferences and keep up with all recent scholarship. Most recently, she has been focusing on the role of generative artificial intelligence in the writing classroom.