07/05/2020

Dr. Susan Thomas Elected CWPA V-P

As of July 1, Dr. Susan Thomas of the University of Sydney, Australia, has been elected Vice-President of CWPA!  Susan will begin her role as Vice-President in July, 2020, and begin her Presidency on July 1, 2021.

Susan Thomas is Professor of Writing and Rhetoric at the University of Sydney, Australia, where she has served as a WPA for sixteen years.  She is the Founding Director of the Writing Hub and Writing Program (now the Department of Writing Studies). Susan has held a variety of leadership roles at the University, including Chair of Department, Director of the Writing Hub, Associate Dean Teaching and Learning, and Teaching Development Coordinator for the Division of Arts and Social Sciences, Law, and Education. She has won several awards for excellence and innovation in teaching and has attracted substantial grant funding for writing pedagogy and infrastructure. A first-generation university graduate, Susan has worked to design more inclusive approaches to writing instruction and create partnerships with writing centers and WAC programs in schools. Together with Lisa Emerson (Massey University, NZ), she is the co-founder of the Asia-Pacific Writing Research Network.

Susan leads CWPA’s Australian affiliate and is an editorial board member of the Writing Program Administration journal. She has served on the CWPA Executive Board and Liaison Committee and the CCCC Executive Committee. She was an inaugural co-editor of the International Exchanges in Writing series of the WAC Clearinghouse, and an inaugural faculty advising editor for the Young Scholars in Writing journal. Susan serves as a WAC Clearinghouse Editorial Board member, as well as a reviewer for several journals and book series, and is a regular presenter at CWPA, IWAC, IWCA, and CCCC, where she has also led pre-conference workshops.

Susan is currently completing two research monographs: Navigating the Unexpected: Writing Program Administration in a Time of Change Management, for the Perspectives on Writing Series of the WAC Clearinghouse, and Designing and Administering Inclusive Writing Programs: An Australian Case Study, for the Parlor Press WPA series.  She is the editor of What Is the New Rhetoric (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007), a collection of essays from the eponymous conference she convened in Sydney in 2005. She is co-editor of “From the Margins to the Center: Writing Across the Curriculum in Australia and New Zealand,” a special issue of the Across the Disciplines journal. Her work has also appeared in TEXT: The Australasian Journal of Writing and Writing Programs, the Australian Higher Education Supplement (comparable to the American Chronicle of Higher Education), The Huffington Post, and the award-winning The WPA Outcomes Statement: A Decade Later, as well as other collections. 

Susan completed her BA in English at Lee University, her MA in English at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, her Ph.D. in English (concentration in Rhetoric and Composition) at Georgia State University, and a graduate certificate in Higher Education Studies at the University of Sydney.

When not teaching, researching, or shaking up the PTA as the resident activist, Susan enjoys hiking and traveling with her family, including their four Shih Tzu dogs.