Megan Heise is originally from Western Pennsylvania and is a proud supporter of (almost) all things Pittsburgh. She is excited to join Utah Tech’s English faculty after teaching at Naropa University, Carnegie Mellon University, and the University of Pittsburgh. Megan holds a PhD in Composition and Applied Linguistics from Indiana University of Pennsylvania, an MFA in Creative Writing and Poetics from Naropa University, and a BA in Political Science and History from Colgate University. She has lived all over the country and the world, from St. George to New York City to Greece.
Megan’s research focuses on multilingual and multimodal zine-making with refugee youth and undergraduate writing students. She is very interested in how students of all types of backgrounds engage with their full ways of communicating, across languages and modalities, to tell their stories and make themselves heard. This work stems from her experiences working in a refugee camp in Greece for 5 months in 2017, facilitating creative projects in a youth engagement space. She has also partnered with the Pittsburgh-based Alliance for Refugee Youth Support and Education (ARYSE), supporting their summer PRYSE Academy, a day camp that merges English language learning with creative expression and leadership development. As an inaugural Coalition for Community Writing/Herstory Fellow in 2020-2021, she created and led an online writing workshop with the Youth Advisory Board of the international NGO Youth UnMuted, all young women with refugee experiences resettled in Germany.
Megan served as a co-editor for Writing Spaces volume 4, and her scholarly work has appeared in TESOL Journal and various edited collections. Her dissertation, “Transmodal Zine-making with Resettled Refugee Youth,” earned the 2022 Russell N. Campbell Doctoral Dissertation Grant award from the International Research Foundation for English Language Education (TIRF). She has presented her scholarship at conferences around the world, including the Conference on Community Writing, Conference on College Composition and Communication, TESOL Convention, and American Association for Applied Linguistics Conference.
She loves to talk about languages, creativity (ask her about zines!), community-engaged learning, and writing in both academic and non-academic contexts – email her or stop by her office if you’d like to connect!