Alumni Spotlight: Sherita Roundtree

Sherita Roundtree

March 5, 2021 by Anne Nagel, Ph.D. Candidate, Literary and Cultural Studies

A 2014 graduate of the master’s program in composition and rhetoric, Dr. Sherita Roundtree went on to earn a Ph.D. at The Ohio State University and is now an assistant professor at Towson University in Maryland. Dr. Roundtree studies approaches for developing diverse representation and equitable access for students, teachers, and scholars who write in, instruct in, and theorize about writing classrooms. Her current work explores the pedagogy and “noise” of Black women graduate teaching assistants and their use of support networks and resources.

 

What are you most excited about in your professional life?

This past September, I put together with others, for the Coalition of Community Writing (CCW), a graduate student workshop for those who were going on the market … I love helping graduate students. I’m also co-chairing the nextGEN Special Committee for the C’s (the Conference on College Composition and Communication) … This committee is really thinking about how we can cultivate new spaces and new opportunities and resources for graduate students. 

I’m also very excited about working at Towson! Towson students are unmatched. Honestly, I have loved every single class that I have taught—the way they engage, the level of critical thinking. Even though remote teaching is draining in ways that I cannot explain, they still energize me, and I feel like I’m constantly learning from them. So I’m so happy to have this opportunity to do that.

One more thing. I’m excited because I’m going to be giving a (virtual) talk at the University of Maryland (titled "Rhetorical Laughter: Black Women’s Restorative Discourse Practices as Teachers of Writing”). I’m excited about being able to talk about my research and the publications that I’m working on.

I feel like the conversations that I have with my students and the ways that I design curriculum for the class have been also inspiring me in ways I hadn’t necessarily anticipated, and it’s showing up in my writing. So hopefully I’ll continue to find some space and time to work on those things.

 

What was your favorite class, reading, or project from your time at UNL?

It was probably Shari Stenberg’s class, “Women’s Rhetorics.” It’s interesting because when I started in the field, it was in undergrad, and it was through writing center work. When I came to UNL, I came there because of Frankie Condon (who was the director of the Writing Center then). The first conference presentation that I did was about the everyday writing center, and my director and mentor at the time told us ten minutes before that three of the authors (including Frankie Condon) were going to be there. We were juniors, and we were freaking out. It was like telling me now that Oprah was going to be there.

So when it came time to apply to graduate schools, my director at the time emailed Frankie to ask if she had any suggestions, because I guess somehow she remembered me. She told me that I should apply to UNL, so I did. I applied there and one other school … and I decided to go to UNL. When I got there, I was so focused on writing center work because that was what I’d done … 

It was a combination of being mentored by Frankie and taking her class, and then taking Shari’s class that focused on women’s rhetoric, that I started to see myself within the field.

For Frankie’s class … we read a text by June Jordan, “Nobody Mean More to Me than You and The Future Life of Willie Jordan.” The story was about teaching a class that was really focused on Black linguistic practices … and I was just like, I have never read anything like this before. That started to kind of turn my gears.

And we also read Elizabeth Boquet’s Noise from the Writing Center, and so that was my first introduction to the concept of noise … One of the questions that emerged for me in that class was: She talks about noise as this productive thing, but what does it mean for those who might otherwise be read as noisy? It’s one thing to choose to be noisy … but it’s another thing to be read as noisy and it be something that is disruptive.

But with Shari’s class … one of the texts that I was drawn to at the time was Melissa Harris-Perry’s Sister Citizen. And it was me tying the conversations and questions that came up for me in Frankie’s class to the things that I was learning (in Shari’s class) about women’s experiences, women’s discourse practices, and the ways that they’re contributing to knowledge in the field that I had not had an opportunity to think about.

When I get to my Ph.D. program, that is where I fully explore that, and I had such amazing mentors … Coming to the point where I was preparing for candidacy, it was like a light switch went off, and I knew what my project was going to be … It was a moment of trusting the process and arriving where I needed to be when I needed to be there. 

 

Looking back, which UNL professor do you think had the greatest influence on you?

I think I would say it was Frankie Condon. We would often meet every week in her office, and I was, at one point, her graduate assistant, so we were talking about my assistant work for her, but I would also talk about my ideas that I was pursuing. And this was just a regular thing.

I think that was so influential because it was such a low-stakes opportunity to explore my interests, but also to get a sense of what the research process looked like. I had other assistantships where I was a research assistant, but this was such a direct engagement in the process. I would do work on my own, but then I would come back and report to her, talk through the process … trouble-shoot what the next steps might look like versus when I was given an assignment, I then submitted that assignment, and then I was given another one.

I think taking the class with her, being able to have those conversations so often, and have her support—and then also working in the writing center—all kind of informed my sense of self.

 

What is your favorite memory of an extracurricular activity from your time at UNL?

The Writing Lincoln Initiative. I was there the year after I think it was thought of … with Kelly Meyer, Ryan Aiello, and Marcus Meade … I was very involved in that. The places I primarily went to were the Malone Community Center for the after-school program—I worked with mostly older kids, so that’s what I would pretty consistently do—but I would also go to the Matt Talbot Kitchen and support the adult literacy class they had.

That was really a great experience, as far as being in the community and doing the work I was passionate about and invested in. Academia is great, but … the reason I got into this was wanting to be in the spaces where I felt like I didn’t have access to or needed when I was not a part of academia or didn’t see folks like me. I think the Writing Lincoln Initiative gave me the opportunity to do the work that really mattered.

Being able to work with people I care about, my friends, while doing that work was icing on the cake.

 

Is there anything you’d like to add?

I love UNL. I felt like I was well supported there. It’s so interesting because (when I moved to Nebraska) ... I was just kind of like, Goodbye, parents. And I was completely fine. Because we’re a military family, my mom kind of gets it, but it was still a big deal. I was well supported there, and I think it informs a lot about how I support my students and how I think about what mentorship looks like.