Sarah Seeley

Sarah Seeley holds a B.A in archaeological studies from State University of New York, College at Potsdam. She also holds an M.A. and a Ph.D. in anthropology from Binghamton University. Sarah made a pivotal career shift in 2011 when she began teaching first-year writing. Before joining the Institute for the Study of University Pedagogy, Sarah taught writing and linguistic anthropology at several universities in the United States.

Teaching writing as a multifaceted social discourse is a central part of how Sarah conceptualizes her work as both an educator and a researcher. Here at UTM, she teaches ISP100 Writing for University and Beyond. This class is designed to help students become more effective, purposeful, and confident writers. Sarah believes that students who develop critical, evaluative understandings of both content and form are more likely to accrue the lifelong benefits of wielding language as power.

Sarah’s research interests include language ideology, writing pedagogy, and academic labor practices. Her research employs ethnographic and other qualitative methods to examine the role of language in the social construction of literacies. Her previous projects have examined how language ideologies shape the communication intensive program at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the first-year writing program at Binghamton University. Sarah’s current research focuses on how the global hegemony of English gives rise to different types of invisible labor within the context of a public research university in Colombia. Her writing is published in venues including the Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning, Currents in Teaching and Learning, the Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics, and Textshop Experiments.

Sarah loves to cook and craft, and she practices yoga daily.