Jennifer M. Cunningham

Dr. Jennifer M. Cunningham is an associate professor of English who started her career at Kent State on the Stark campus where she served as the Chair of the Stark English Writing Program Committee. She now serves as the Writing Program Coordinator for the University/English Department. Focusing much of her teaching and research on online writing instruction (OWI), she has developed and taught fully online undergraduate courses such as College Writing I and II, Composition Theory, and Gender & Language. She also teaches a hybrid graduate course for all new teaching assistants in the English department who will be teaching composition classes.

Much of Dr. Cunningham’s previous research involves the examination of African American Language (AAL) as it exists in digital spaces like social network sites and text messages. Among other scholarly activities, she works with the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) Online Writing Instruction (OWI) Standing Group and is currently investigating the Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework as it applies to OWI. Along with her research team (Mary K. Stewart, Lyra Hilliard, and Natalie Stillman-Webb), she was awarded the 2018 Conference on College Composition and Communication Emergent Researcher Award for “Cross-Institutional Study of Communities of Inquiry in Blended and Online Composition Courses.”

Selected Publications

(2018) “wuz good wit u bro”: Patterns of digital African American language use in two modes of communication, Computers and Composition, 48

(2017). African American language is not good English. In Loewe, D. M. & Ball, C. E. (Eds.), Bad ideas about writing (pp. 88-92). Morgantown, WV: West Virginia University Libraries. 

(2016). The Bedford Bibliography of Research in Online Writing Instruction.  Skurat Harris, H. (Ed.), Boston: Bedford/St. Martin. (annotator)

(2015). Digital African American language: A corpus analysis of text messages. In Thomas, P. & Takayoshi, P. (Eds.), Literacy in practice: Writing in private, public, and working lives (pp. 58-70). New York, NY: Routledge.

(2015). Mechanizing people and pedagogy: Establishing social presence in the online classroom, Online Learning, 19(3), 34-47.

(2014). The features and functions of digital African American language, Written Communication, 31(4), 404-433. 

(2014). Literacy and identity when approximating African American language on social network sites. Journal of Literacy and Technology, 15(1), 54-77.

(2011). I love Annie Dillard’s mother: A linguistic analysis of ‘Terwilliger bunts one,’ RASK: International Journal of Language and Communication, 34, 77-105.

(2011). Actively and critically learning: The pedagogical importance of student affinity, Journal of Teaching Writing, 25(2), 223-238.