Dr. Katherine Tirabassi

Dr. Tirabassi is a Professor of Communication, Director of the Center for Research & Writing, and Affiliate Faculty in English at Keene State College. She teaches professional communication & writing, research methods, creative nonfiction/writing, and coordinates the internship program for Communication & Philosophy majors and minors. She has published articles on archival research, creative nonfiction, critical reading strategies, composition pedagogy, writing center theory/practice, and sixteenth-century French writer and editor Marie de Gournay. She has co-written a book on civic engagement with Dr. Darrell Hucks and Dr. Tanya Sturtz. Dr. Tirabassi earned her PhD at the University of New Hampshire in 2007. Her dissertation, "Revisiting the 'Current-Traditional Era': Innovations in Writing Instruction at the University of New Hampshire, 1940-1949, " received the 2008 College Composition and Communication Conference James Berlin Memorial Outstanding Dissertation Award. She is working on a book focusing on how extracurricular writing efforts at New England colleges and universities during the mid-1930s through the early 1960s shaped ideas about teaching writing during that time, and created unique and fruitful connections among student writers, teachers, professional writers, editors, and publishers.