Charles Bazerman is an American educator and scholar. He was born and raised in New York. He has contributed significantly to the establishment of writing as a research field. Best known for his work on genre studies and the rhetoric of science, he is a Professor of Education at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he also served as Chair of the Program in Education for eight years. He served as Chair of the Conference on College Composition and Communication, delivering the 2009 CCCC Chair's Address, "The Wonders of Writing," in San Francisco, CA. He is the author of over 18 books, and over 20 edited collections including: Traditions of Writing Research, Genre in a Changing World, Textual Dynamics of the Profession, Writing Selves/Writing Societies, What Writing Does and How it Does It, and the Handbook of Research on Writing.
Academic career
Bazerman did his undergraduate work at Cornell University, and earned a Ph.D. in English and American Literature at Brandeis University in 1971. He has taught at Baruch College, City University of New York from 1972 to 1990, becoming a full professor in 1985. He was professor of Literature, Communication and Culture at the Georgia Institute of Technology from 1990 to 1994. In 1994 he joined the English faculty at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and in 1997 he became a Professor of Education in the Gevirtz Graduate School of Education at the University of California, Santa Barbara where he also served as chair of the program in education from 2000 to 2006. He has also taught at Cornell University, the National University of Singapore, Universidade Federale de Pernambuco, and PS93K elementary school in Brooklyn. His work has been translated into Portuguese, Italian, French, Spanish, and Chinese.
Writing across the curriculum is a movement within contemporary composition studies that concerns itself with writing in classes outside of composition, literature, and other English courses. According to the most recent comprehensive survey, performed in 2006-2007, approximately half of American institutes of higher learning have something that can be identified as a WAC program. This page principally concerns itself with WAC in American colleges and universities. WAC has also been important in Britain, but primarily at the K-12 level.
Writing research
Bazerman is the founding organizer of the Research Network Forum, a forum for early career scholars and graduate students, the Consortium of Doctoral Programs in Rhetoric and Composition, and the Rhetoricians for Peace. In 2011, Bazerman became the Inaugural Chair of the newly formed International Society of the Advancement of Writing Research.
Activities
Bazerman is an advisor to the Hypothes.is project.
Primary works
Bazerman, Charles. "Reporting the Experiment: The Changing Account of Scientific Doings in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 1665-1800." In Landmark Essays on Rhetoric of Science: Case Studies. Ed. Randy Allen Harris. Mahwah: Hermagoras Press, 1997.
The informed writer: using sources in the disciplines, Houghton Mifflin, 1995,
Edited collections
, Parlor Press LLC, 2005,
, Charles Bazerman, David R. Russell Eds. Routledge, 1994,
Charles Bazerman, Paul A. Prior, Ed, What writing does and how it does it: an introduction to analyzing texts and textual practices, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2004,