Bruce Kovanen is a PhD candidate in the Center for Writing Studies and the English Department at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Bruce Kovanen hails from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. He attended Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois where he graduated with a BA in Psychology and honors in Composition and Rhetoric. As a student at Knox, Bruce developed a strong interest in writing studies while working as a writing consultant in Knox’s writing center and as a GED tutor in the Carl Sandburg Adult Learning Center. As a graduate student at the University of Illinois, Bruce became actively involved in the Graduate Employees’ Organization (GEO Local 6300), where he served as Grievance Officer, Officer-at-Large, and Co-President. In addition, Bruce was a member of the GEO’s bargaining team and strike committee in 2018 when graduate workers went on a twelve day strike. These experiences form the basis of his dissertation project, “Trajectories of Learning and Doing Literate Activity and Labor Activism in a Graduate Worker Union,” which aims to enrich our understanding of the various places, activities, and experiences that inform how people come to be involved in labor activism, how labor activists learn to leverage and adapt their communication to various audiences, and how labor activists learn to make organizing assessments and act on those assessments.