California State University, Los Angeles

Christopher S. Harris began teaching in the English Department at California State University, Los Angeles in August, 2009, and specializes in rhetoric and writing.

A graduate of Bowling Green State University (PhD in Rhetoric and Composition) and South Dakota State University (BA, MA in English), Harris served four years in the United States Marine Corps ("Just passing time," as Lucas Jackson would say)  before attending college. While attending college, Harris worked on the graveyard shift at two factories and a hotel, and he spent his summers building log houses for Twin Springs Log Homes in Hill City, SD.

As an undergraduate at South Dakota State University, Harris focused his elective studies in minority literature and earned a certificate in European Studies. During his master's degree studies, Harris concentrated on composition-rhetoric and American Literature of the 1800s, writing his thesis about Timothy Shay Arthur's Ten Nights in a Bar-Room and what I Saw There.  As a graduate student at Bowling Green State University, Harris concentrated in the history of composition instruction, teaching with computers, and alternative rhetorics, writing his dissertation, First-Year Composition Handbooks: Buffering the Winds of Change, about the ways in which composition textbooks historically have both reflected and guided composition instruction, just as culture breathes life into genres.

Harris previously served as director of the First-Year Composition program at the University of Louisiana at Monroe. There, he gained considerable experience in outcomes-based assessment, developing a trend-based assessment program. 

With Sandra Hill, Harris published a chapter in Service-eLearning: Educating for Citizenship. Other projects include grants to support technology-enhanced learning environments, research about assessing writing,  research about rhetorical chironomia, and research about visualizing the structure of the essay. 

Current projects include an article that discusses ways to implement wikis in the classroom. Harris is collaborating with Elizabeth Monske on a manuscript that addresses the theory and practice of teaching digital service-learning courses in rural and outlying communities.

Harris currently teaches a range of courses, including English 550: Seminar in Rhetoric and Composition: Visual Rhetoric; English 310: Genres of Writing; English 505: Language and Literacy; English 102: Composition; English 101: Composition; and English 504: Theories of Composition and Rhetoric.

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Degrees and Institutions

PhD, Rhetoric and Composition, Bowling Green State University, Ohio

MA, English, South Dakota State University

BA, English with certificate in European Studies, South Dakota State University

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