Dr. Boucher-Yip has taught in many parts of the world including Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, China, Laos, the United Kingdom, and the United States. She has taught communication skills and writing courses at university level for over a decade. Her teaching approach is informed by her own experience in language learning and with theories of second language acquisition and their pedagogical applications. Both her studies and her experience have taught her that there is no one method or idea that guarantees successful language learning. ... View Profile
Jennifer deWinter
Professor-Arts, Communications, and Humanities
Office: FL B25a
Phone: +1 (508) 8315000 x6679
Jennifer deWinter has long been interested in how culture (which is local) moves internationally. She has spent a number of years analyzing anime, comics, and computer games as part of global media flows in order to understand how concepts such as "art," "culture," and "entertainment" are negotiated. In 2003, Professor deWinter joined the Learning Games Initiative, a group of scholars and game designers dedicated to the general study of games and the use of games to teach concepts and skills in particular. ... View Profile
Brenton Faber
Professor of Writing
Email: bdfaber@wpi.edu
Office: SL 019
Phone: +1 (508) 8315000 x4930
Brenton Faber studies medical writing and the human factors that influence medical diagnosis, treatment, and patient care. He is a practicing paramedic who volunteers with a rural ambulance squad and at a free urban clinic. I am currently interested in the concept of "allostasis" and "allostatic load." The terms have been used to describe a continued activation of the body’s neural, neuroendocrine, and immune systems as an adaptive response to prolonged stress. ... View Profile
Lorraine D. Higgins
Teaching Professor
Email: ldh@wpi.edu
Office: SL 020
Phone: +1 (508) 8315000 x5503
My field is rhetoric, and I teach writing as a form of inquiry and problem solving. One challenge in my teaching is to get students to see writing that way. It is not simply window dressing for ideas they already have; writing is a way to create and test ideas, to engage in a dialogue with a community of readers who need to know what they have to say and will likely have something to say back. Some students approach their first college writing assignment as an exercise in demonstrating they can quote from expert sources, organize paragraphs, and punctuate sentences. ... View Profile
My primary focus is technical and professional writing. However, I also teach general writing courses that are less technical in nature. Having spent over 20 years in industry as a professional writer, I tend to think about how I can help students become stronger writers in the workplace. I also believe that, in becoming stronger writers, students should enjoy the process. So I try to structure my classes in a way that allows students to improve their writing skills while writing about topics that interest them. As a professor of practice, I believe in learning by doing. ... View Profile
Ryan Smith Madan
Associate Teaching Professor-Arts, Communications, and Humanities
Office: Salisbury Labs 233A
Phone: +1 (508) 8315000 x6561
When new acquaintances find out I teach writing, it’s not unusual for them to lament a broad decline in the nation’s writing skills. How does it make me feel, they ask, that students, say, don’t know the difference between adjectives and adverbs? Or, can I believe it that people hardly even know what apostrophes do, let alone where to put them? As someone who treasures good, careful prose, I’m sympathetic to these worries. But as an educator, I think it’s important to steer the conversation in a different direction. ... View Profile
I am an Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Rhetoric. Before joining WPI, I was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley. My work is animated by an intellectual curiosity with how ideas travel across time and space, and generate diverse practices of acting, seeing, and being in the world. I am especially intrigued by situations in which people come to ask new questions about themselves and others, in ways that require reconsideration of past experiences and imagining of future possibilities. ... View Profile
Associated Faculty
Angel A. Rivera
Associate Professor of Spanish
Email: arivera@wpi.edu
Office: Salisbury Labs 016
Phone: +1 (508) 8315000 x5779
Professor Rivera has been conducting research on 19th- and 20th-century Spanish Caribbean literature and theories related to the exploration of limits or borders (i.e., the edges or places where multiple cultures touch or come into contact). He has been exploring how Caribbean traditional modes of representation have been restructured to significant changes in cultural, literary, and historical contexts. ... View Profile
Scott P. Runstrom
Adjunct Instructor/Lecturer
Email: runstrom@wpi.edu
Office: Salisbury Labs 106
Phone: +1 (508) 8315000 x5436
I am a graduate of the Professional Writing program at WPI, and have over 20 years experience in the technical communications industry. I am currently employed full-time as a Principal Technical Writer at MathWorks in Natick. I have been teaching technical and professional writing at WPI since 2000. I love technical writing because it combines two of my passions, writing and technology, and when done well, enables you to communicate complex technical information to the world. ... View Profile