Jennifer Cunningham
Jennifer M. Cunningham,
Indian Valley Class of 2000
Jennifer M. Cunningham, a 2000 graduate of Indian Valley, earned her BA in Integrated Language Arts from Malone University, before attending The University of Akron where she earned an MA in Composition and a Certificate in Linguistics and Kent State University where she earned a PhD in Rhetoric and Composition. Beginning her academic career at Stark State College, she was hired as an assistant professor at Kent State’s Stark campus before transferring to the Kent campus.
Currently, Cunningham is an associate professor of English and the Writing Program Coordinator at Kent State University, where she oversees first-year writing and teaches composition theory as well as gender and language. Much of her previous research aims to level linguistic hierarchies and involves the examination of African American Language as it exists in digital spaces like social network sites and text messages. Most notably, she has published in Written Communication and Computers and Composition, for which she won the Ellen Nold Best Article Award in 2018.
Among other scholarly activities, Cunningham works with the Conference on College Composition and Communication’s (CCCC) Online Writing Instruction (OWI) Standing Group and the Global Society of Online Literacy Educators (GSOLE) where she sits on the executive board. Her present research involves investigating the Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework as it applies to writing studies. Along with her research team, she was awarded the 2018 CCCC Emergent Researcher Award and has related forthcoming articles in College Composition and Communication and Composition Forum.
