Biography
Logan Middleton is a PhD candidate in the department of English and the Center for Writing Studies.
Although originally from San Francisco, Logan earned his BA in English and Communication Arts with an emphasis in film from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In 2017, he completed his MA in English with a concentration in writing studies at the University of Illinois, where he continued to cultivate scholarly interests in multimodal composition, disability studies, and community literacies.
As an outgrowth of his work with the Education Justice Project—a college-in-prison program at Illinois—Logan's research has crystallized around the ties and tensions between literacy, higher education in prison, and abolition in the 21st-century carceral state. In his dissertation, "Literacy, Pedagogy, and Prisons: Tracing Power in Higher Education in Prison Contexts," he explores how prison educators navigate flows of state power across spaces of teaching on the inside and outside alike.
Research Interests
Prison education, abolition, community literacies, multimodal composition, disability studies, qualitative research methods
Highlighted Publications
Turnipseed, Nicole, and Logan Middleton. “Writing Across Media: Graduate Students as Multimodal Composition Instructors and Administrators.” Multimodal Composition: Faculty Development Programs and Institutional Change. Eds. Shyam B. Pandey and Santosh Khadka. Routledge, 2021, pp. 51-65.
Birchmier, Chelsea, Austin Hoffman, Logan Middleton, A. Naomi Paik, and Angela Ting. “Towards Abolitionist Unionism: Resisting Pandemics, Police, and Academic Austerity at the University of Illinois.” Journal of Academic Freedom, vol. 12, 2021, pp. 1-15.
Wisniewski, Carolyn, María Paz Carvajal Regidor, Lisa Chason, Evin Groundwater, Allison Kranek, Dorothy Mayne, and Logan Middleton. “Questioning Assumptions about Online Tutoring: A Mixed-Method Study of Face-to-Face and Synchronous Online Writing Center Tutorials.” Writing Center Journal, vol. 38, no. 1-2, 2020, pp. 261-290.
Barrett, Larry, Pablo Mendoza, Logan Middleton, Mario Rubio, and Thomas Stromblad. “‘More than Transformative’: A New View of Prison Writing Narratives.” Reflections: A Journal of Writing, Service-Learning, and Community Literacy, vol. 19, no. 1, 2019, pp. 11-30.
Middleton, Logan. “Precarious Rhetorics” (review). Quarterly Journal of Speech, vol. 106, no. 3, 2020, pp. 361-365.