The Louisiana Tech School of Literature and Language is delighted to announce that a new assistant professor in technical writing, Dr. Joseph Williams, is joining the Department of English this fall.

Holding a Ph.D. in Technical Communication and Rhetoric from Texas Tech University, Williams, a Georgia native, comes from a military family and lived in Georgia, California, and Washington State as a youth.

During his master’s work, Williams served as a graduate exchange student for two semesters at Turkey’s prestigious Bogazici University, where he took classes in applied linguistics and taught a basic computer course as well as a basic Spanish course. For the last 17 years, he worked in the Arabian Gulf, mostly at Texas A&M University’s branch campus in Qatar, where he taught Freshman Composition, Intercultural Communication, Language of Film, Literature and the Other Arts, and Technical Communication & Rhetoric (TCR). In his TCR classes, he has enjoyed collaborating with engineering professors on student assignments; he hopes to develop further collaborative assignments here at Tech with engineering, architecture, and business.

Williams has served on a clean-up crew for Qatar’s mangroves; at Texas A&M, he worked on the ABET committee for a number of years as well as served on the Qatar Faculty Forum (QFF) as committee member, presenter, and session moderator. The QFF organizes sessions of current research from branch entities such as Texas A&M, Carnegie-Mellon, Georgetown, Cornell, and Northwestern. Williams was also the STEAM Coordinator at Texas A&M, and he organized showcases of student work as well as high-profile student-run software seminars for faculty, staff, and students. 

Williams completed his Ph. D. in the hybrid online / on-site program at Texas Tech University, where he developed a wide range of research interests. His dissertation, a marriage of petroleum-risk communication and intercultural communication, explored the effectiveness of a global entity’s safety initiative on oil platforms. He is in the process of publishing articles on visual rhetoric within architecture, the effectiveness of intercultural e-mail in the workplace, and a Burkean analysis of an online article collaboration.

A selection of Williams’ research interests includes Cyborgs, Intercultural Communication, Risk Communication, and Visual Rhetoric.  This fall he is teaching English 303: Technical Writing and English 363: Technical Presentations.

Williams will join Dr. Kirk St. Amant in the English Department’s development of new offerings for its Technical Writing Certificate and its Master of Arts program.