Dr. Elena Makarion
Assistant Teaching Professor
makarie@wfu.edu
I began my career writing fiction, completing an MA in Creative Writing and Literature at Harvard University and then an MFA in Fiction Writing at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG). After teaching writing workshops for several years, I decided to pursue a PhD in Rhetoric and Composition from UNCG so I could study the high-stakes impact that stories have in medical contexts. In addition to my PhD, I have a certificate in Women’s and Gender Studies, and I use disability and structuralist critiques of societal norms that determine the forms our stories take and how they are received by others.
I believe it is important to discuss not only how to write but why we write. In my courses, I invite students to question writing assumptions and broader cultural stories and to imagine new possibilities for making meaning in their lives. In addition to writing academic essays, students keep a writing notebook and reflect on the ways that writing can be a transformative process. My goal is to expose students to a wide variety of the different rhetorical strategies available to them, so they can garner greater agency in the writing decisions they make.