Emily Lowman, Ph.D.
Assistant Teaching Professor
I believe writing is a tool for the exploration of ideas and a tool for self-expression. I see these two pursuits as deeply entwined and I’m particularly interested in how we express our explorations in ways which invite others to travel with us. In my courses, I ask students to explore and interrogate the values and ideas we encounter in popular media as they shape us and the media around us. By paying close attention to what we’re drawn to, we can sensitize ourselves and others in what effective argumentation looks like in different media contexts and use it to develop and support our own multi-media arguments.
My teaching and my research focus on “reader” reception to “texts” writ broadly. My formal training, undertaken in the course of receiving my PhD from the University of Rochester, focused on reception, rhetoric, and authority in the contexts of medieval literature and media studies, with additional training in speculative fiction and writing composition. Since then, my teaching and my research have expanded to explore how constructs we often take for granted (such as time, crisis, travel narratives, and medical stories) work together with media expressions (such as film, music videos, and video games) to offer opportunities for persuasive argumentation. In short, I dive deep into how media influences us to think about the world in ways we might not expect at first glance. Prior to joining the faculty at Wake Forest, I taught writing composition and media studies courses at the University of Rochester and at St. John Fisher University.