Neil Simpkins

Job Title

Assistant Professor, UW Bothell

Profile Photo

Image

Neil Simpkins

Preferred Pronouns

he/him/his

Office and Building Number

UW1-333

Email Address

Phone Number

Intro

I explore how disabled students experience college writing, and the rhetorical tactics they use to navigate higher education. I’m also interested in how writers use planners and journaling as part of their writing process.

Teaching

At UW Bothell, I primarily teach in the First Year Composition Program. In my classes, we research, critique, and write about access in higher education. Through writing and interactive classroom practices, we interrogate how we got to college, how to thrive, and how to change higher education for the better.

Research/Scholarship

My current projects use qualitative interviewing methods to explore how students with disabilities navigate higher education. I describe how students learn and transfer knowledge about access and accommodations across college classrooms, particularly as they relate to college writing. I contrast the impact of set timeframes like quarters and deadlines with the crip time inherent in disabled embodiment. I also grapple with how disabled students resist, take up, and use disability identity rhetorically.

I am gearing up for a project that explores how disabled students use planning and journaling techniques as an important part of their writing process. Later down the road I’m hoping to explore how transgender people experience and navigate the literacy systems that constrain and enact trans life in the United States.

Education

Ph.D., Composition and Rhetoric, UW-Madison

M.A., Literary Studies, UW-Madison

B.A., English Literature, Agnes Scott College