craig stroupe's home page

I will be on Single Semester Leave to do research, and won't be offering classes.

In the spring, I'll teach "Web Design and Digital Culture" (COMP 5230), and Visual Rhetoric and Culture" (COMP 3220).

At a dinner for a famous Visiting Author..., the guest of honor, who was sitting next to me, asked what I did on campus. I rattled on briefly about “advising faculty” and “online pedagogy.”

Listening carefully, the Visiting Author’s eyes cleared after a moment. She pulled back from me slightly as if to get a better look and said, “You mean distance education?"—as if I had been struggling to find a euphemistic way of explaining that I handled the campus’s medical waste."

— from "Making Distance Presence: The Compositional Voice in Online Learning" published in Computers and Composition (September 2003) More on my scholarship....

As a kid, I wanted to become a writer and move north, away from the sticky heat of Titusville, Florida.

I still remember, one muggy Christmas evening, seeing a Florida palmetto bug—imagine a cockroach on steroids—crawling across a plywood snowman's chest in a neighbor's front yard. In the floodlight shining up from the dense grass, the bug cast a shadow big as a fist. "Someday," I told myself, "I'll be long gone from here and I'll write about that."

Now, I teach Web design and visual rhetoric at the University of Minnesota Duluth where I write about New Media and often get up from my computer to make sure that it's still snowing outside.

My article "The Lost Island of English Studies: Globalization, Market Logic, and the Rhetorical Work of Department Web Sites" will appear in the July 2005 issue of College English.

Personal Canon

Why do so many ordinary Americans vote for corporate interests rather than their own? Thomas Frank explains how the Right appropriated populism in his incisive and entertaining book What's the Matter with Kansas? Frank is editor of The Baffler, a magazine of cultural criticism.

Archive.org's "WaybackMachine" allows you to visit archived versions of Web sites. Enter the URL of any site to see the site as it was in past months and years.

Jill Walker's blog from the University of Bergen

A pseudo-documentary from Canada, Trailer Park Boys creates a small universe not so far, far away.

Incident at Loch Ness: "IT BEGAN as another documentary about the myth of the Loch Ness monster but has turned into one of the most talked-about movies of the year, with some describing it as Scotland’s Blair Witch Project." More from the Scotsman...

2:00 p.m. Tues/Thurs

9:30 a.m. Tues/Thurs
6:00 p.m. Wed

Most of us can still remember the sounds of drills grinding and rattling through cinderblock walls when crews first installed Ethernet cables in faculty office buildings.

Did that racket signal the first breaching of what Gerald Graff has called the "systematic non-relation" among disciplines, which keeps the university from realizing its social and intellectual mission, or were we hearing only stop-gap dental work near the end of the century to keep the old university from losing its teeth altogether?"

— from "Technologizing the Conflicts: Graff and the Web" in Pedagogy. More on my scholarship....

"The Rhetoric of Irritation: Inappropriateness as Visual/Literate Practice" appears in the book Defining Visual Rhetorics edited by Marguerite Helmers and Charles Hill and published by Lawrence Erlbaum Publishers. More on my scholarship....