Hi y’all! It’s so great to join the Digital Rhetoric Collaborative this year as a graduate fellow. I’m coming to this fellowship from the Composition, Rhetoric, and English Studies (CRES) program at the University of Alabama. I’m a third-year PhD student who focuses on digital literacies of online discourse groups and writing program administration.
Technology feels like such a big word that has shaped my life in different ways—I feel like it’s always impacted my surroundings. From the pencil, used to draw or scribble illiterate stories before I’d even learned to write, to the multi-technological set-up I have going while writing this introduction: I have an example on my laptop, a pen and notebook to do the actual drafting, and “her” by JVKE playing through my headphones.
Growing up in a rural area just outside of an arguably rural Alabama city, internet wasn’t something I had access to as a child—well, we had halfway decent dial-up. After I’d learned how to spell and form sentences, I would spend after school on an old typewriter at my mother’s workplace: drafting stories and fanfictions. Thankfully, only one would come back to haunt me as a teenager. Games were a far larger component of my early introduction to technology. My free time was taken up with Pokémon or my dad’s old Super Mario Bros.
This interest has continued into my PhD program as I’ve met other amazingly quirky people who admit to having a favorite Pokémon or want to game with me on the weekend when I should probably be writing for one of my projects or doing some other kind of work. These interests expanded to completing a pilot study on gamifying the First-Year Writing classroom or just being reasons I’ve met some of my favorite collaborators with whom I have amazing projects going. My individual research tends to focus more on the digital literacies and collaborative nature of online spaces, as I’m fascinated by why people come together, what keeps them coming back, and what happens when they build these online discourse groups. The groups I tend to focus on are gaming, fanfiction, or fandom in general. In my current collaborative projects, I am researching graduate labor, leadership, and learning; these projects take on an administrative view of the ways that my fellow graduate students support one another and build their own communities within their departments.
Most days, you can find me wandering the halls of the English Department. I work as the Graduate Student Administrator for our First-Year Writing Program and currently teach Technical Writing (my students are awesome). If not there, I’m likely in a writing group, giving the odd stand-up comedy performance, playing Blood on the Clocktower, or at the gym; or if it’s after 8 pm, either convincing my friend, Cas, to let me walk their dogs with them or gaming and listening to an audiobook (I almost always have recommendations for both). I give presentations, occasionally, on the weird and quirky ways people make friends online—or, I guess, more academically, the digital rhetorics and literacies of online discourse groups, and try to keep up with random notes left in random places.
Feel free to connect with me through email at mdreeves1@crimson.ua.edu or follow me at @mdreeves16.bsky.social.
A late-night writing group with Tarah and Liv, a Friendsgiving in UA’s graduate lounge, Cas and I out for a midday walk, a group of UA grad students at C&W 2026, a stand-up performance, and an action shot from a Blood on the Clocktower game night.
