Zachary Smith

Zachary Smith is a Ph.D. candidate in Rhetoric & Composition at the University of Kansas. He is originally from South Elgin, Illinois and received his B.A. in English from the University of Alabama. His research, which draws on scholarship from rhetoric and composition, technical and professional communication, and cultural geography, focuses primarily on geographic and spatial rhetorics, place-based composition, community-engaged pedagogy, and materialism. Some of his other interests include representations of place in popular culture, ecocomposition, professionalization, Southern Gothic Literature, and strategies for facilitating engagement in writing centers and first-year composition programs.

Zachary is currently working on his dissertation, which explores how various stakeholder institutions construct place through technical documents to reflect diverse, multifunctional purposes. Through an examination of self-guided tours of Lawrence that foregrounds accessible and ethical representations of place and community, he hopes to support further engagement with embodied, emplaced technical genres in composition classrooms.