Interview with Dr. Erica Cirillo-McCarthy
Meet Dr. Erica Cirillo-McCarthy, MTSU’s newest director of the University Writing Center! Coming from an extensive background in rhetoric studies, both as a student and teacher at various universities from Florida Atlantic to Stanford University, Dr. Cirillo-McCarthy is passionate about mentoring and professionally developing both tutors and students and creating collaborations and programming across campus to support student writers. Away from the classroom and the Writing Center, she’s an avid hiker and a real pro at healthy, vegetarian cooking. Dr. Cirillo-McCarthy has an extensive and impressive academic career, however it didn’t start out quite as you’d expect.
“When I first went to university — I’m a first gen student — I didn’t know how to be a student and I failed out after three semesters. I had like a 1.2 GPA and they showed me the door. So I worked in really crappy jobs for about six years. You’ve probably heard of the GAP; I worked at the GAP. So just really bad retail jobs. And I knew that there was something better for me, but I didn’t know what it was. So I knew I had to go back to school.”
She enrolled back in community college to chase after that better something, and she quickly began to see a common problem in the writing community that would later become a great passion within her career.
“It’s not that writing was a barrier to me, but I started realizing that writing and writing courses can be barriers — they can be gate keepers to students who might not be prepared or come from under-resourced high schools. I came from a pretty under-resourced high school.”
After a bit more time in community college, she transferred to her local state university Florida Atlantic.
“I was an English major and I graduated with a bachelors in English, but I didn’t know what that meant or what I could do with it. I did do an internship in a lifestyle magazine during my senior year, and I highly recommend internships to English majors and minors because it helps you identify the things that you might not want to do. I thought the lifestyle magazine would be all Sex in the City, and we’d be drinking champagne, and that’s not what happens! It’s really hard writing! I just wrote so much and I realized ‘Okay, that’s not what I want to do.’”
It was during her undergrad program that she discovered a love for women’s literature and feminist pedagogy.
“I would say the class that influenced me the most was my women’s literature class because it introduced me to women authors and women issues in a way that I had never thought of before and was never exposed to before. I think that that was the class — it was probably my junior or senior year as an undergraduate — that’s the class when I was like ‘Oh! I’m a feminist, this all makes sense!’ We read everything from Alice Walker to Toni Morrison to Virginia Woolf, all of these really great feminist authors and women authors that really just rock my world.
“That still informs how I try to practice what I do here in the writing center, that I try to have a feminist administrative stance. One of the things I’ve learned about feminist pedagogy is transparency. Making sure that the tutors and the students understand why we do the things that we do as administrators, and also giving the tutors the tools that they need to do their job in the best way. I also think it’s about when facing a conflict or an issue here at the writing center, figuring out a response that supports the student or the tutor in the best way. So it’s always about facilitating growth and helping them become either the best tutor that they want to be or the best student.”
During her graduate degree program at Florida Atlantic was when she discovered her real passion.
“One way to pay for graduate school is to teach first year comp, and the minute I stepped into that classroom, I realized this is what I wanted to do. It invigorated me, it challenged me, it was something that lit a fire. So I finished my master’s program and I worked in the writing center during my master’s program. And that got me really interested in the work that writing centers do, what they represent on the campus, their communities within institutions, and also their relationship with other departments and programs on campus.
“As a graduate student, that was my first job: in a writing center. It was a very competitive position. I thought it would be a great gig for me. But I didn’t know that I would fall in love and then that it would sustain me for this long.
I [also] worked at a writing center in Arizona — my PhD program — and this was the coolest writing center. It was in the basement of the basketball arena. It was a writing center that was created solely for athletes, so all of the athletes in Arizona’s division 1, there’s a lot of athletes there. All the athletes would have study hall and they would hold study hall in this particular place, and so we would hold writing center hours there. When there was a basketball game, you’d hear it! And you’d just would have to kind of push through it! [laughs]”
Once she graduated with her PhD, Dr. Cirillo-McCarthy worked as assistant director of the writing center at California Lutheran University, then moved to Stanford University where she taught in the rhetoric and writing program and also held the position of assistant director of the Hume Center for Writing and Speaking before finally landing at MTSU in 2018 to share her love of studying rhetoric and writing.
“I think because I see rhetoric as a meta discipline in the way that every discipline has rhetoric, it has communication in it, right? So when we think about the study of rhetoric, the study of writing, it permeates through everything we do. And I also think that communication is the way to meet any kind of conflict or problem. It’s a way to change reality. It’s through communication, it’s through conveying our ideas, conveying our point of view to other people. To me it’s everything. We are both creators of and consumers of rhetoric. All of that really fascinates me in so many ways.
“Just think about if everyone had that grounding of communicating in more effective ways, how much fewer conflicts we would have if we were able to convey our ideas in more accessible ways. To me, that’s really at the heart of rhetoric, and composition is how we enact that in universities.”
“I’m really excited to be here. I was looking for a position in a state school. Coming from Stanford, I think Stanford was amazing, but it is an elite institution and it’s completely different from a state school. And as a state school graduate myself, I wanted to take everything I learned from Stanford and bring it to state school students. I like to think that I’ve done some of that, that really close mentoring with my writing students that I was able to do there, I want to do here.”
For more information on the Writing Center, visit their MTSU page.
