by Alexander Mika, ’21 (CLAS)
Alex Gatten is a visiting assistant professor of English and the associate director of First-Year Writing at the University of Connecticut, where he also recently completed his PhD in English. His work explores the relationship between gender and sexuality and forms of writing, particularly in Romantic poetry and poetics, queer rhetorics, and digital writing and pedagogy. A portion of this research has been published in the European Romantic Review, and he is a co-editor of the Reviews & Receptions section of the online scholarly resource Romantic Circles. For several years, he has been working with First-Year Writing on the new curriculum, in addition to conducting research on multimodal writing and pedagogy. He looks forward to continuing this work in the English department.
Paige Walker is originally from the Houston, Texas area, but has lived numerous places beyond Houston since her teens. After completing her MEd from the University of Houston, she worked as a high school teacher and community college professor for a number of years before relocating with her family to Australia. During her time in Australia, she continued teaching online for Lone Star College, completed her MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University Los Angeles, and published “Morning Star” in the Ezine, LiteraryMama. Upon returning to Texas, she continued with her career as a community college professor and high school teacher. Walker and her family relocated to Tennessee in 2015, and she continued to teach while also completing her PhD in English with a focus in rhetoric, writing and linguistics from the University of Tennessee. Paige’s dissertation analyzes March for Our Lives use of Twitter as a Shoaling Rhizome, a theoretical framework first published in Computers and Composition’s May 2019 special issue. Currently residing in Virginia with her partner, daughters, dog, and cat, Walker joined the University of Connecticut, Stamford this August as an assistant professor in residence of FYW and the Stamford liaison to UConn’s FYW program. Walker teaches several sections of FYW for UConn Stamford as well as coordinates scheduling, training, and the general implementation of the UConn FYW program at the Stamford campus. She also represents Stamford FYW to the greater UConn FYW community.