Who is James Berlin

James A. Berlin (1942 ? 1994) was a theorist in the field of composition studies whose work typically takes historical and rhetorical perspectives. A Marxist philosophy also informs his scholarship. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in Victorian literature in 1975. He served as a professor of English at Wichita State University, at the University of Cincinnati, where he directed first-year English from 1981-85, and at Purdue University from 1987-1994. Between Cincinnati and Purdue, Berlin served as visiting professor at the University of Texas and at Penn State Universit...

Composition Studies (also referred to as "Composition and Rhetoric," "Rhetoric and Composition," "College Composition," "Writing Studies," or simply "Composition") is the professional field of writing research and instruction, focusing especially on writing at the college level in the United States. In many American colleges and universities, undergraduate students must take freshman ? sometimes even higher ? composition courses. For example, in California, all public colleges and universities have freshman and sophomore composition courses as requirements.

Many composition scholars study not only the theory and practice of post-secondary writing instruction, but also the influence of different writing conventions and genres on writers' composing processes. As written conventions and genres change over time, compositionists continue to learn how these changes influence writers and how writers work to change the conventions within which they work.

Cultural studies is an academic field grounded in critical theory, which combines political economy, communication, sociology, social theory, literary theory, media theory, film/video studies, cultural anthropology, philosophy, museum studies and art history/criticism to study cultural phenomena in various societies. Cultural studies researchers often concentrate on how a particular phenomenon relates to matters of ideology, nationality, ethnicity, social class, sexuality, and/or gender. In a loosely related but separate usage, the phrase cultural studies sometimes serves as a rough synonym for area studies, as a general term referring to the academic study of particular cultures in departments and programs such as Islamic studies, Asian studies, African American studies, et al.. However, strictly speaking, cultural studies programs are not concerned with specific areas of the world so much as specific cultural practices.