Teaching ESL to international students at the university level got me
interested in understanding how writing works in the complex contexts of
graduate seminars and programs. As I undertook situated studies of
writing, classroom discourse, and response to writing, I found a need for
theoretical frameworks that respected the complexity, multiplicity, and
historicity of the phenomena I was finding. For that reason, I became
interested in sociohistoric and practice theories (e.g., Bakhtin, Bruner,
Cole, Duranti, Engestrom, Goffman, Hutchins, Lave, Leontev, Minick, Moll,
Ochs, Rommetveit, Vygotsky, Wertsch). I have also been interested in
related work in science studies (e.g., Collins, Knorr-Cetina, Latour,
Pickering). In writing studies, I have been particularly interested in the
work of people like Bazerman, Brandt, Chin, Herrington, Kamberelis, Myers,
Phelps, and Witte. My most recent articles report studies of a sociology
seminar / research team: "Tracing Authoritative and Internally Persuasive
Discourses: A Case Study of Response, Revision, and Disciplinary
Enculturation" _Research in the Teaching of English_, Oct. 95, and
"Response, Revision, Disciplinarity: A Microhistory of a Dissertation
Prospectus in Sociology" _Written Communication_, Oct. 94. I'm currently
working on a book dealing with writing and disciplinarity, and I've been
thinking a lot about genre, prolepsis, mediated agency (and authorship),
joint orientation (and disorientation), the nature of artifacts and their
roles in the historical production of persons, communities, and
institutions, the laminated and perspectival nature of communities and
institutions, and forms of participation in academic work.
Paul Prior
Assistant Professor
Department of English
University of Illinois
Urbana, Illinois 61801
Tel: 217-333-3024