Bradley Dilger

Professor, Department of English, Purdue University
+1-309-259-0328 ~ dilger@purdue.edu ~ @cbdilger

I study and teach writing transfer, networks, and programs using mixed empirical methods. I’m starting my ninth year at Purdue University, where I direct our first-year writing program, Introductory Composition at Purdue. Previously, I was professor at Western Illinois University in Macomb, Illinois. I earned my PhD from Florida in 2003.

Curriculum vita: brief (2pp PDF) or inclusive (27pp PDF, in Purdue’s “Form 36” style).

Back to #WPAlife!

I recently returned to the director (WPA) position for Introductory Composition at Purdue. I began work on August 15, 2022, which is the first day of our Fall 2022 orientation, 42 days ago.

Selected scholarship

I have two research projects. First, a collaborative longitudinal study of writing transfer, with sixteen student and fourteen faculty participants from a regional state comprehensive university. My collaborator Neil Baird and I are writing up our findings as a series of articles. See more on our web site.

I’m also developing Crow, the Corpus & Repository of Writing, with Shelley Staples, Ashley JoEtta, Michelle McMullin, Adriana Picoral, Randi Reppen, and a team of graduate and undergraduate students from Purdue, Arizona, Northern Arizona University, and other universities. Our Crow platform is up and running! And I'm glad to say we have been awarded two major grants: a 2019 ACLS Digital Extension Grant, and a $142,000 grant from Humanities Without Walls. See our recent blog posts for more information.

Please contact me if you need access to any of the scholarship I describe here.

Other scholarship

With Neil Baird, guest-editing the summer 2022 special issue of Composition Forum, focusing on the discourse-based interview.
Michelle McMullin and I documented Crow's approach to sustainable, ethical collaboration, which we call "constructive distributed work," in “Constructive Distributed Work: An Integrated Approach to Sustainable Collaboration and Research for Distributed Teams" from JBTC 35.4 (October 2021).
With the Crow distributed work team, two SIGDOC conference papers describing our professionalization efforts: “Student Professionalization through Grant Writing” at SIGDOC 2020, and “Using iterative persona development to support inclusive research and assessment,” for SIGDOC 2021.
“People, programs, & practices: A grid-based approach to designing and supporting online writing curriculum,” written with Allegra Smith, Libby Chernouski, Bianca Batti, and Alisha Karabinus. This article describes the “grid” approach Introductory Composition at Purdue uses to semi-standardize online courses. In PARS in practice: Resources and strategies for online writing instructors.
Proposed changes in the Common Rule: CCCC Response, which I edited in cooperation with Heidi McKee, Joyce Locke Carter, and the CCCC Research Committee.
“The Unseen Weight of Class.” Review essay. CCC 65.3 (Feb 2014).
From A to <A>: Keywords of Markup, the collection I edited with Jeff Rice (Minnesota, 2010)
"Beyond Star Flashes: The Elements of Web 2.0 style"" in Computers and Composition 27.1 (March 2010).
Work on web standards at CCCC 2008 and CCCC 2010
“Extreme Usability as Technical Communication.” In Critical Power Tools: Technical Communication and Cultural Studies, J. Blake Scott, Bernadette Longo, and Katherine Willis, eds. SUNY Press, 2006.

I also have recent work in the collection Florida (Jeff Rice, ed, Parlor 2015) and the collection Networked Humanities (Brian McNely, ed, Parlor 2017).

Teaching & advising

Slide deck for ENGR 103, September 2022: Written communication in the workplace

In Fall 2022, I will host the Hutton Lectures in Rhetoric & Composition.

I currently advise Shelton Weech, Kailyn Shartel Hall, and Marisa Yerace. Past advisees include Dr. Allegra Smith, Dr. Rebekah Sims, Dr. Hadi Banat, Dr. Michelle McMullin, and Dr. Derek Sherman.

Find my list of current, future, and past courses.

Conference presentation materials

Other stuff

Purdue English statement on mentoring
Materials for ICaP (Introductory Composition)
Professional development resources:
- Grant writing 101 for CLA graduate students
- Responding to student writing
- Building a web-based portfolio, a workshop for the Purdue Professional Writing Association (PWA, April 12, 2022).
- Branding with logotypes, a workshop for the Purdue Professional Writing Association (October 19, 2021).