Cover Letter

Rachel Kurasz

115 w Park Blvd

Villa Park, IL 60181

rckurasz@gmail.com

630.234.0268

Dear Interested Institution:

 Hello. My name is Rachel Kurasz, and I am applying for the position of Tenure Track Faculty  at your institution. I am currently finishing my dissertation for my Ph.D. in Rhetoric and Composition with a specialization in Multimodal Rhetoric and Media Studies at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, Illinois, and I am set to finish before August of 2024. My whole life I have seen writing and rhetoric as much more than an alphabetic practice limited to books and papers, but as something that encompasses everything in our world and is especially used in media.

Since a young age, I have been fascinated with all forms of media, especially TV shows, movies, and comic books. As I got older, I started creating them for myself, winning various awards for my films, art, comics, and comedy sketches. I earned my BA in Mass Communication Media Arts with a focus on Radio/Television Production and Writing in 2013 from Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. During my undergraduate career, I also had many media production jobs and internships working for PBS, local production studios, and marketing firms. Throughout my experience in the media field, I saw the importance of good writing and the usage of rhetoric to send intended messages to audiences on a mass level. I saw how production crews would not only integrate their messages through the scripts, but also through the visuals, the spacing, the gestures of the actors, and the sound. From this, I then wanted to enhance my own creative writing as I longed to work as a media writer and got a Creative Fiction Writing MFA from Roosevelt University in 2017. But while attending Roosevelt, I started taking graduate-level Rhetoric and Composition classes and fell in love with rhetoric even further. Taking a teaching college writing course during my final year at Roosevelt further solidified my desire to be a college professor of rhetoric and composition. During my time at NIU, I searched for a way to combine all of my experiences and knowledge into one focus, which is where I discovered Multimodal Rhetoric and Composition. I specialized in it and even created my own comprehensive exam under the purview of my now Dissertation Director, Dr. Bradley Peters, on Multimodal Rhetoric and Composition and Comics/Animation Pedagogy, which I passed alongside my Rhetoric exam in January 2022.

Focusing on Multimodal Rhetoric/Composition and Media—especially on comics and animation—led to my dissertation tentatively entitled We Let the Joke Go on Too Long: South Park’s Rhetorical Social Turn Amidst Trumpism, where I focus on how South Park utilizes dialectical rhetoric—via Bruce McComiskey’s work Dialectical Rhetoric—to analyze current pressing discourses on a week-by-week basis since 1997. I also heavily discuss their own rhetoric’s social turn from 2013-2023 where the animators and writers atoned for past misgivings in the show and worked towards making the show more socially aware and responsive while still maintaining its biting satire and comedy. In the future, I hope to continue my research on not only South Park—as there are many more chapters I could have written in addition to the ones already written—but also on Disney’s Animation Studios, cartoons both drawn and animated in different historical eras, comics/graphic memoirs and how to use the composition and rhetorical study of media in the higher education classroom to aid in learning and writing processes.

My teaching has primarily been within the First Year Composition Programs at Northern Illinois University and North Central College. I have taught 16 courses both synchronously online during the COVID years and in-person—in Spring 2020, having to pivot from in-person to online due to the lockdown—introducing students to higher education writing/research and multimodal composition/rhetoric, and one course on Graphic Memoirs. In my application packet, you will notice I have included my teaching evaluations, as most every semester, I get fairly high scores and great feedback from students, mentioning how helpful my class was in helping build their confidence in their writing and demystifying the large research essay. They also mention how compassionate and caring I am in my teaching practices, which I view as very important in teaching writing because it can be a very daunting, anxiety-provoking, personal thing. I want every one of my students to leave my class feeling they have learned things about their writing, themselves, and the world at large, as well as seeing that their writing has improved along the way. Through my research on multimodal rhetoric, I have also done work connecting multimodal rhetoric and composition pedagogy and increasing the equity and accessibility of my classroom—especially  when it comes to neurodiverse students—of  which I was and still am one myself. It is a passion of mine as a student who grew up confused about my writing and confidence in it due to my brain working differently than most to help students see that there truly is no such thing as a “bad writer,”only a writer who has not been given the proper tools and guidance to succeed or taught the writing genres in ways that their brains can understand. Therefore I seek to always be improving my teaching in the hopes that my class can be as accessible and equitable as possible.

I thank you so much for your time and consideration. I can be contacted via my email rckurasz@gmail.com or through phone at 630.234.0268. I am ready and willing to relocate if need be and should be ready to start in August of 2024. If you have any further questions, do not hesitate to contact me. Thank you again.

Sincerely,

Rachel Colleen Kurasz