Looking for Middle Ground at Middlebury College: Campus Controversies, Local Exigencies, and the English Classroom

Shawna Shapiro is associate professor of writing and linguistics at Middlebury College in Vermont, where she also directs the Writing and Rhetoric Program. Her research focuses on college transitions and innovative writing pedagogies for international and immigrant-background students. Her work has appeared in Research in the Teaching of English, Composition Studies, Journal of Basic Writing, and TESOL Quarterly, among others, and she has contributed to a number of edited collections. She is the author of Fostering International Student Success in Higher Education (2014) and coeditor of Educating Refugee-Background Students: Critical Issues and Dynamic Contexts (2018). She is also active in educational reform in her local school district.

James Chase Sanchez is assistant professor of writing and rhetoric at Middlebury College. His research interests are in cultural and racial rhetorics, public memory, and writing assessment, and his research has appeared in College Composition and Communication, Journal of Contemporary Rhetoric, Present Tense, and Writing Program Administration. He is currently working on two books: a coauthored manuscript tentatively titled Race, Rhetoric, and Research Ethics and a solo manuscript tentatively titled The Salt of the Earth: The Rhetoric of White Supremacy. The second manuscript is based partly upon a documentary Sanchez produced, titled Man on Fire, which won an International Documentary Association Award in 2017 and aired on PBS via Independent Lens in 2018.