Brandee Easter joined the department this year as an assistant professor in digital and new media. Her research focuses on how bodies are imagined, constructed, and experienced in relationship to technology. Working from rhetorical studies, she explores how arguments are made about, with, and in technology with the goal to understand discourses of technological objectivity better. 

Her current book project explores this through case studies in esoteric programming languages, which are creative projects that test the boundaries of what computational expression can be. Her second book project, co-authored with Christa J. Olson, brings these interests in technology and media to argue for a more capacious understanding of “the visual” within rhetorical studies. On Visual Rhetoric, which received the University of Michigan Press/Sweetland Publication Prize in Digital Rhetoric, argues that visuality must include not only visual objects, but also intangible images, visual technologies, and the cognitive-physical act of seeing.

Before joining the department, Easter was an assistant professor in the Writing Department at York University in Toronto. She earned an MA in English literature at the University of Alabama and a PhD in English, with a specialization in composition and rhetoric, from the University of Wisconsin. 

At UT she will teach undergraduate and graduate courses in her area of expertise, including a new course on the expressive and creative possibilities of digital media titled Multimedia Storytelling.