Home Departments: English, Office of the Provost
Executive Director of General Education in the Office of the Provost
SLAT Areas of Specialization: Instructional Dimensions of L2 Learning, Sociocultural Dimensions of L2 Learning
Susan Miller-Cochran is professor of English and Executive Director of General Education in the Office of the Provost at the University of Arizona. She teaches undergraduate courses in rhetoric and composition and graduate courses in the doctoral program in Rhetoric, Composition, and the Teaching of English (RCTE). She served as Director of the UA Writing Program from 2015-2019. Before joining the faculty at UA, she was a faculty member at North Carolina State University (2006-2015) where she directed the First-Year Writing Program. Prior to NCSU, she was a faculty member in English at Mesa Community College (AZ). She also taught writing and applied linguistics and co-developed the first online course in the English Department as a graduate student at Arizona State University.
Her research focuses on writing in the disciplines, technology in writing instruction, writing program and higher education administration, labor in writing programs, and L2 writing. Her work has appeared in the journals WPA: Writing Program Administration, College Composition and Communication, Composition Studies, Computers and Composition, Enculturation, and Teaching English in the Two-Year College, as well as several edited collections. She is a co-editor of Composition, Rhetoric, and Disciplinarity (Utah State UP, 2018); Rhetorically Rethinking Usability (Hampton Press, 2009); and Strategies for Teaching First-Year Composition (National Council of Teachers of English, 2002). She is also a co-author of An Insider’s Guide to Academic Writing (Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2017), The Cengage Guide to Research (Wadsworth/Cengage, 2017), and Keys for Writers (Cengage, 2016). She has been the PI or co-PI on fifteen separate grants related to technology, writing instruction, and classroom design (totaling nearly $120,000). She has served on the Executive Committee of the Conference on College Composition and Communication and the Executive Board of the Council of Writing Program Administrators, and she is a Past President of the Council of Writing Program Administrators (2015-2017).
Research Interests: Rhetoric and composition, writing program administration, instructional technologies, L2 writing, labor practices in writing programs, scholarship of teaching and learning