Scott Rogers

Scott Rogers was born in the desert and grew up on a farm but will always call the city home. As a kid, his family moved from Arizona to Missouri and then to Southern California where he attended high school. After languishing in a local community college for several years, he got his act together and, in 2001, earned a B.A. in Literature from the University of California, Los Angeles. While earning this degree, Scott worked full time for the now defunct retail book chain Borders Books and Music (whose demise he rightly predicted as early as 2000). Borders was an excellent learning experience and Scott has the book and music collection to prove it.

After taking some time away from school, Scott realized that he wasn’t very good at anything else, and so, graduate school beckoned. He first attended the University of New Mexico, where he earned an M.A. in English Literature and Language in 2006. He went on to earn a Ph.D. in Rhetoric and Writing from the University of Louisville in 2011. His dissertation, called “Writing Out the Storm: Post-Traumatic Pedagogy and the Work of Composition,” examined the role and value of writing pedagogy in the wake of large-scale disasters like Hurricane Katrina. Inspired by programs designed by local citizens to serve their communities after the storm, Scott became interested in community writing and the influence of space/setting on how we make sense of the world. Having spent so much time in New Orleans, he now considers “The Big Easy” like a second home.

Scott arrives at PLU from Ohio Northern University, a small liberal arts school in northwest Ohio, where he served as Director of University Writing. His teaching interests include: first-year writing, community and public literacy, professional writing with an emphasis on new media, and the application of rhetorical theory to visual and spatial artifacts. His research interests are focused on many of these same topics, as well as writing across the curriculum and programmatic assessment.