Sandra Jamieson has been teaching at Drew University since 1993, first as Director of Composition (1993-2008), then as Director of College Writing (2008-2012), and now as Director of Writing Across the Curriculum. As WAC Director she founded and oversees a course-embedded undergraduate Writing Fellows Program, that is central to Drew’s vertical Writing Studies Program. Writing Fellows are embedded in the interdisciplinary first-year Drew Seminars [Directed by Jens Lloyd] and in Writing Intensive courses and Writing in the Majors courses across the curriculum, providing continuity of vision and approach for students as they develop their writing skills and supporting faculty. Sandra teaches writing at all levels and she and Jens anchor the English Department’s concentration in Writing and Communication Studies, where her courses include a popular upper-level Writing Intensive course, “Blogs, Tweets, and Social Media: The Art of Digital Communication” and “Writing for Wikipedia: Infortmation LIteracy and Access to Knowledge.” She also team-teaches “Teaching in the Two-Year College” with Professor Philip Chase from County College of Morris (CCM), part of the Two-Year College Concentration of Drew’s Caspersen School of Graduate Studies Arts & Letters Program.  [See “Teaching“]

In Fall 2024, Sandra was the Resident Director of Drew’s Semester in London. A decade ago, she was the inaugural director of Drew’s New York Semester on Communications and Media, bringing the program from idea to implementation in Spring 2015 and then passing direction to the newly formed Media and Communications Program (now major). In 2016 and 2017, Sandra and Spanish Professor Ada Ortuzar-Young led a three-week trip to Cuba and Miami. The program, “A Tale of Two Cities: Havana, Cuba & Little Havana, Miami,” invited students to explore the culture, history, food, stories, and experiences of Cubans in Cuba and in Miami through lectures, visits, social encounters, and observation (see the student’s blog to learn more). In addition to Drew-sponsored experiential learning programs, Sandra was the Faculty Advisor of a student service program, the Drew Honduras Project from 1994 to 2020, regularly visiting Honduras and the Dominican Republic with them.

Sandra has held office in the NJ State Conference of the AAUP, served a three-year term as chair of the English department (2008-2011), and served on many College and University committees including the Middle States Steering Committee (2019-2021). She chaired the Middle States Assessment Working Group (2019-2021) and the Academic Assessment and Engagement Committee (2024); and served as a member of the Curriculum and Academic Policy Committee, the Dean’s Council, and the Committee on Faculty. In January 2014 she was a Fellow at the IRTS Foundation in preparation for developing the New York Semester and new courses in writing and communication studies. Professionally, she served as chair of the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC’s) Committee on the Major in Writing and Rhetoric, from 2007-2016 and served on the CCCC’s Executive Board from 2008-2010.

Her publications include The Bedford Guide to Writing in the Disciplines: An Instructor’s Desk Reference (with Rebecca Moore Howard), and three co-edited collections, Points of Departure: Rethinking Student Source Use and Writing Studies Research Methods (with Tricia Serviss–read reviews here), Information Literacy: Research and Collaboration across Disciplines (with Barbara D’Angelo, Barry Maid, & Janice R. Walker), and Coming of Age: The Advanced Writing Curriculum (with Linda Shamoon, Rebecca Moore Howard, & Robert Schwegler). She has published articles on the the writing major and the vertical writing curriculum, plagiarism, patchwriting, engaged reading, research-writing, writing across the curriculum, information literacy, textbooks, and multi-cultural education. Her current interests are authorship and generativeAI, the writer’s voice, and rhetorical intertextuality.

Sandra and Rebecca Moore Howard are principal investigators in the Citation Project, a collaborative, multi-site, data-based study of college students’ use of research sources. She is also a lead researcher and US coordinator of the 7-year international Partnership on University Plagiarism Prevention (PUPP), funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) with the goal of increasing understanding of how student use digital sources (including generative AI) and how educators can help them avoid plagiarism. Drew University is a research partner and Jamieson is one of three Regional Coordinators, with Irene Glendinning (Coventry University), and lead researcher and grant recipient Martine Peters (Université du Québec en Outaouais) [more here].

Sandra says that what drives all of her work is the desire to learn to teach students how to write effectively, correctly, and creatively for many audiences including themselves. She is also interested in tracking the habits of mind we teach and model in and outside of the classroom, and the behaviors we unintentionally reinforce when we think we are teaching something else.

Check out Writing Studies Tree.

Oh, and then there are the cats–-the real reason compositionists first made websites…