Lisa Gerrard

Lisa Gerrard holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Berkeley. Since she came to Writing Programs in 1980, she has mentored graduate students, developed new courses (including the first English 131 for pre-law students, and Spanish 373, writing pedagogy for teachers of Spanish and Portuguese), and created a computer-enriched curriculum for upper- and lower-division composition.

She has received five OID Instructional Improvement Grants: four to develop software (1988, 1989, 1990, 1991) for English and Spanish language writing; and one to develop a virtual reality-based first-year writing course (2002). She has won several awards, including the Technology Exemplar Award, National Council of Teachers of English, 2001 and the UCLA Distinguished Teaching Award, 1990.

Her publications include three software packages for student writers, two in English and one in Spanish, four textbooks for students writing in French, Spanish, or English, and scholarly works in women’s studies, nineteenth-century literature, and rhetoric and composition. She is currently writing an article on gender in virtual reality environment, which began as a paper she gave at CCCC (“‘More Than an English Assignment’: Defining Oneself in Second Life,” 2010) and is based on her experiences teaching English 3 using the virtual reality space Second Life.