Joseph Bizup

Associate Dean for Undergraduate Academic Programs and Policies

  • Office 725 Commonwealth Avenue, Room 402
  • Phone (617-358-3242)
  • Education BA, University of Virginia
    MA, University of Maryland
    PhD, Indiana University

Joe Bizup serves as the Associate Dean for Undergraduate Academic Programs and Policies. He is also an Associate Professor of English.

His interests have ranged over the years from Victorian literature and culture, to cognitive psychology and cognitive linguistics, to writing studies, writing pedagogy, and writing program administration. The common thread on which these beads are strung is his preoccupation with the ways in which language, especially written language, functions and circulates within social, intellectual, and institutional systems.

Joe’s first scholarly passion was Victorian poetry, but he was later drawn to the more explicitly rhetorical discourses of Victorian social and aesthetic criticism. His book Manufacturing Culture: Vindications of Early Victorian Industry (2003), emerged from this interest. In it, he shows how British proindustrial writers in the first half of the nineteenth century pressed the characteristic tropes of British Romanticism into service defending and promoting an emerging industrial culture. As Joe worked on this project, he also became increasingly concerned with rhetorical and institutional matters closer to home: student writing and writing instruction as they are practiced in the modern university. His investment in these issues has been both intellectual and practical. Joe’s current scholarly work concerns the intersections of prose style, genre, and argumentation. He has edited or co-edited two textbooks, the 13th edition of the Norton Reader (co-editor) and the 11th edition of Joseph M. Williams’s Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace. Additionally, he co-directed the Bass Writing Program at Yale and directed the Undergraduate Writing Program at Columbia. Joe holds a B.A. from the University of Virginia, a M.A. from the University of Maryland, and a Ph.D from Indiana University.