Tisha Turk

In addition to working one-on-one with Grinnell student writers, Dr. Turk trains Grinnell’s Writing Mentors, coordinates the Writing Mentors program, collaborates with the Writing Center’s professional instructors, and consults with faculty across campus about how best to assign and respond to writing in their classes. Prior to joining Grinnell, she was writing center director and associate professor of English at the University of Minnesota Morris, Minnesota’s public liberal arts college.

Her most recent research examines transformative works: texts that transform other texts. Specifically, she examines how and why media fans make and watch vids, short videos that combine clips from movies or television with carefully chosen music to celebrate, interpret, or critique the original texts. Her fan studies research has been published in journals including Transformative Works and Cultures and Music, Sound, and the Moving Image and in collections including the Routledge Companion to Media Fandom and A Companion to Media Fandom and Fan Studies. She has worked with legal teams from the Organization for Transformative Works and the Electronic Frontier Foundation to win Digital Millennium Copyright Act exemptions granting vidders and other remix artists the right to break copy protection on media files for fair uses of copyrighted material.

When she’s not geeking out about writing and remix, she is usually reading, cooking, gardening, biking, listening to music, or watching sci-fi TV of dubious quality.