The Writing Program is pleased to invite you to Laura Wilder's talk on writing instruction and generative AI. This talk expands on the findings from her recent book, Tracing the Impact of First-Year Writing; Identity, Process, and Transfer at a Public University (Utah State UP, 2024), which received the 2025 Association for Writing Across the Curriculum's award for Best WAC Monograph.
Talk: "Writing is Difficult, AI is Not: The Impact and Ethics of Writing Instruction"
Speaker: Laura Wilder, Chair and Associate Professor, English Department, SUNY-Albany
Date & Time: Wednesday, March 25, 2026, 4:00–6:00 PM
Location: Murray Hall, Room 302 (510 George Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901)
About the Speaker:
Laura Wilder is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of English at University at Albany, SUNY. Her first book, Rhetorical Strategies and Genre Conventions in Literary Studies: Teaching and Writing in the Disciplines (Southern Illinois UP, 2014), uses rhetorical analysis, as well as a combination of ethnographic and experimental methodologies, to delineate the rhetorical strategies that literary scholars use across their writing. Her second book, Tracing the Impact of First-Year Writing; Identity, Process, and Transfer at a Public University (Utah State UP, 2024), reports on the findings of a longitudinal study that compares students who did and did not take a first-year writing course at a public university, arguing that students who take a first-year writing course are more likely to self-identify as writers.
Wilder has also co-authored a textbook (with Joanna Wolfe) on teaching literary analysis, Digging into Literature: Strategies for Analytic Reading and Writing (Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2016), and has published peer-reviewed articles in Pedagogy, College Composition and Communication, and Research in the Teaching of English, among other venues.