Christopher Sean Harris began teaching in the English Department at California State University, Los Angeles in August, 2009, and specializes in rhetoric and writing.
A graduate of Bowling Green State University (PhD in Rhetoric and Writing) and South Dakota State University (BA, MA in English), Harris served four years in the United States Marine Corps ("Just passing time," as Lucas Jackson would say) before attending college. While attending college, Harris worked on the graveyard shift at two factories and a hotel, and he spent his summers building log houses for Twin Springs Log Homes in Hill City, SD. During his free time, Harris enjoys outings with his wife and daughters, endurance sports, and upcycling.
As an undergraduate at South Dakota State University, Harris focused his elective studies in minority literature and earned a certificate in European Studies. During his master's degree studies, Harris concentrated on composition-rhetoric and American Literature of the 1800s, writing his thesis about Timothy Shay Arthur's Ten Nights in a Bar-Room and what I Saw There. As a graduate student at Bowling Green State University, Harris concentrated in the history of composition instruction, teaching with computers, and alternative rhetorics, writing his dissertation, First-Year Composition Handbooks: Buffering the Winds of Change, about the ways in which composition textbooks historically have both reflected and guided composition instruction, just as culture breathes life into genres.
Recent publications include "First Steps with ePortfolios on a Technology-Hesitant Campus," which appeared in the In Computers and Composition Online Special Issue on Deploying 21st Century Writing on the Economic Frontlines, and “From the CMS Sepulcher, the Phoenix, Moodle Rises," which appeared in the In Computers and Composition Online Special Issue on Open Source and Free Software. Currently, Harris is working on a multimodal analysis of writing instruction of the 1800s.
Harris currently teaches a range of courses, including English 550: Seminar in Rhetoric and Composition: Visual Rhetoric, Electronic literature and Digital Rhetoric; English 310: Genres of Writing; English 505: Language and Literacy; English 102: Composition; English 101: Composition; English 504: Theories of Composition and Rhetoric; EDAD 626: Writing the Doctoral Dissertation.
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