Neil Baird

Neil Baird’s current research focuses on the relationship between social constructions of the body and rhetoric.  He is currently working on publishing chapters from his dissertation entitled “The Embodied Literacies of Collegiate Football Players,” an ethnographic case study that examines how the male body is socially constructed by the sport of football and the ways this social construction impacted the writing of four collegiate football players in classrooms across the disciplines.

His essay “Virtual Vietnam Veterans Memorials as Image Events: Exorcising the Specter of Vietnam,” which examines online memorials by drawing on the New Rhetoric of Chaim Perelman and  Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca, has been recently published in two places.  It was published as a chapter in Thirty Years After: New Essays on Vietnam War, Literature and Film, an anthology that makes a significant contribution to scholarship on the literature and film of the Vietnam War.  It was also reprinted in Enculturation: A Journal of Rhetoric, Writing, and Culture (http://enculturation.gmu.edu/6.2/baird).

This year, he will be presenting “A Practical Grounding in Contrastive Rhetoric: How Tutors Approach Difference in the Writing Center” at the 2009 Midwest Writing Center Association and “Undergraduate Ethnographies of Digital Communities: Methodological Adaptation in Studies of World of Warcraft and Second Life” at the 2010 Conference on College Composition.

His current research interests include writing center theory and practice, qualitative research methods with a specific emphasis on ethnography, and the negotiation of identity in electronic environments.  Neil continues this research at Western Illinois University, where he teaches writing studies courses at the undergraduate and graduate levels and directs the University Writing Center.