Professor Waite's areas of interest are Composition, Rhetoric, Literacy, Queer Theory/ Queer Pedagogies, Teaching of Writing, Feminist and Gender Studies, and Creative Writing/ Poetry. “Whether I am teaching courses in composition, gender studies, or creative writing, I think of my students and myself as mutually engaged in the process of creation and disruption. I ask my students to write in ways that complicate their conceptions of narrative, form, identity, and meaning. I think of my classroom practice as driven by a pedagogy of blurring, engaging students with complexities and overlaps that help them to consider the dynamic tensions of language in their own thinking and writing. Writing offers the unique opportunity to explore the assumptions we have accumulated in a lifetime of cultural contact. This exploration not only creates spaces for layered, creative, and intellectual writing, but also requires writers to self-reflexively examine difficulties, to face what is difficult to see—something I think reaches far beyond the scope of writing itself. My students’ ideas and contributions are at the center of my own intellectual work and my classroom. I am deeply invested in my relationships with my students and feel grateful to them for showing up, time and time again, and for their infinite willingness to bring forth their curiosity, creativity, and attention.”