David Fleming

Professor
Department of English
University of Massachusetts Amherst

I teach undergraduate courses in writing and graduate courses in composition-rhetoric at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.  From 2007-2011, I also directed the University Writing Program.  My research interests include histories of rhetoric, theories of argument, and pedagogies of writing.  My publications include City of Rhetoric: Revitalizing the Public Sphere in Metropolitan America (SUNY Press, 2008) and From Form to Meaning: Freshman Composition and the Long Sixties, 1957-1974 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011).

Check out my blog for UMass Amherst's "Common Read" – now in its 3rd year!
And see my fall 2012 courses: English 891TT and English 350 (which also has a blog)!
In spring 2013, I'll be on leave, working on a book project.

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Contact Information:

Department of English (413) 545-2972 (office)
University of Massachusetts Amherst email: dfleming@english.umass.edu
Bartlett Hall, Hicks Way office: 267 Bartlett Hall
Amherst, MA 01003-9269 office hours: Wed., 11-1, and by appt.

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Academic Autobiography:

A graduate of Needham Broughton High School in Raleigh, NC (alma mater of writers Reynolds Price, Anne Tyler, and Armistead Maupin), I received my A.B. in English from Davidson College (NC) in 1983.  After a year teaching high school in East Africa, I moved to Washington, DC, where for two years I was managing editor of the Youth Policy Institute, founded in 1979 by David Hackett as a project of the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial.  In 1987, I began work on the M.A. in English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, receiving the degree in 1989.  I then taught composition and literature for two years at Laredo Community College in south Texas, and in 1991 began work on the PhD in Rhetoric at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, where I wrote a dissertation on rhetorical practices in the design professions.  From 1996 to 1998, I was assistant professor of English at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces; and from 1998 to 2006, I was assistant and then associate professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where I directed both the English 100 (freshman composition) and English 201 (intermediate composition) programs.  I am currently professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and former director of the University Writing Program.  I teach graduate courses in our composition-rhetoric doctoral program, and I am active in the national discipline of writing, rhetoric, and literacy studies, serving on the editorial boards of Rhetoric Review, Rhetoric Society Quarterly (2007-2011), and Written Communication. I have written two books: City of Rhetoric: Revitalizing the Public Sphere in Metropolitan America (SUNY Press, 2008) and From Form to Meaning: Freshman Composition and the Long Sixties, 1957-1974 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011), which won the 2012 Outstanding Book Award from the CCCC and the 2011 Mina P. Shaughnessy Prize from the MLA. I am currently at work on a third book, about the past, present, and future of the bachelor's degree in the United States, tenatively titled American Baccalaureate.
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Courses:

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 Click here for links to other composition and rhetoric sites on the internet.