UC Irvine’s Jonathan Alexander receives 2023 CCCC Co-Exemplar Award
Accolade recognizes top contributors in field of composition
Jonathan Alexander, Chancellor’s Professor of English and informatics, has received the 2023 CCCC Co-Exemplar Award, as chosen by the Conference on College Composition and Communication, a constituent organization within the National Council of Teachers of English. Alexander shares the 2023 honor with Jacqueline Rhodes, professor of rhetoric and composition at the University of Texas at Austin.
The CCCC Executive Committee presents the Exemplar Award to persons whose years of service represent the highest ideals of scholarship, teaching and service to the entire profession. Exemplar Awards recognize individuals whose work is national and international in scope and who set the best examples for the CCCC membership.
In a statement on this year’s Co-Exemplar Award recipients, the CCCC stated: “While their individual contributions as scholar-teachers and administrators is deserving of the highest praise, it is their collaborative work in multimodality/digital composition and queer rhetorics that has greatly influenced writing studies and rhetorical theories and, as one nominator noted, ‘challenged inherited presumptions about both sexuality and rhetoric.’”
Alexander said he was thrilled upon learning of the announcement. “The Exemplar Award is akin to a ‘lifetime achievement’ award in my field, rhetoric and composition, and to be recognized for decades of work as a scholar is tremendous,” he added. “I’m humbled and immensely grateful for the honor – and for everyone in the field who has helped me along the way.”
One such person is Daniel M. Gross, who has been Alexander’s colleague at UC Irvine since 2007. A fellow English professor and the Campus Writing and Communication Coordinator, Gross observed, “Jonathan has been a national leader when it comes to stretching the boundaries of writing studies, as he has always approached his myriad interests with composition in mind. Computers and composition, classroom writing, science fiction, multimodality, queer memoir, young adult fiction, lifespan writing, literary criticism in its popular form – Jonathan has done so much, and always with a compelling interest in how our world might be composed differently.”
Alexander will be formally announced as a recipient of the 2023 CCCC Co-Exemplar Award at the opening session of the 2023 CCCC Annual Convention on Feb. 16, 2023.
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