Denise Comer, Assistant Professor of the Practice of Writing Studies and Director of First-Year Writing at Duke University, has worked for over fifteen years with writing faculty who hold Ph.D.s from across the social sciences, natural sciences, and humanities. Duke University’s award-winning and nationally recognized Thompson Writing Program (TWP) is founded on the premise that cross-disciplinary conversations about writing improve the teaching of writing and help students learn how to more effectively navigate the varying landscape of academic writing. This shared endeavor of approaching the teaching of first-year writing as an intellectual endeavor based in disciplinary and interdisciplinary inquiry have helped earn the TWP national recognition with the 2006 CCCC Writing Program Certificate of Excellence and the 2012 U.S. News & World Report, which commended Duke for “making the writing process a priority at all levels of instruction and across the curriculum.” Comer’s scholarship, which has been published in leading journals, explores writing theory and pedagogy. She has two books forthcoming in 2014 from Fountainhead Press: It’s Just a Dissertation: Transforming Your Dissertation from Daunting to Doable to Done (co-authored with Barbara Gina Garrett), and Writing in Transit. An Anthology with Readings from the Disciplines.

A Transfer-Based Framework for Inter-Disciplinary Communication, Teaching, and Research This talk foregrounds transfer as a crucial framework for navigating the dynamic, intersecting, and disparate contexts of academia. A transfer framework invites faculty, administrators, and students to actively engage with, reflect on, and position themselves within and across those varying and overlapping domains. Doing so can facilitate increased networks of collaboration, more robust advances in knowledge and research methods, improved pedagogy, and increased student learning gains.