Amanda Licastro
Dr. Amanda Licastro (she/her) is responsible for providing instructional design support around emerging technology and digital literacies. She works closely with staff in WIC, the Education Commons, Vitale Digital Media Lab and Hechtman Recording Studio in collaboration with other Library units and campus partners to ensure success of the critical literacies initiative.
Amanda was formerly the Assistant Professor of Digital Rhetoric at Stevenson University in Maryland. Her research explores the intersection of technology and writing, including book history, dystopian literature, and digital humanities, with a focus on multimodal composition and Extended Reality. Amanda serves as the Director of Pedagogical Initiatives of the Book Traces project and is co-founder of the Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy and the Writing Studies Tree. Publications include articles in Kairos, Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities, Hybrid Pedagogy, and Communication Design Quarterly, as well as chapters in Digital Reading and Writing in Composition Studies, and Critical Digital Pedagogy. Her co-edited collection, Composition and Big Data, is in production from University of Pittsburgh Press. The grant-funded project on Virtual Reality Amanda developed and executed was awarded the Paul Fortier Prize at the 2017 Digital Humanities conference, and has been featured in the Baltimore Sun and Baltimore Magazine.
At the Graduate Center, CUNY, Amanda completed a doctorate degree in English with a certificate in Interactive Technology and Pedagogy. In 2016, her dissertation, “Excavating ePortfolios: What Student-Driven Data Reveals about Multimodal Composition and Instruction,” won the Calder Award in Digital Humanities. Amanda has also earned distinguished teaching awards from Stevenson University and CUNY for teaching with innovative technology. The Writing Studies Tree, an a digital academic genealogy project, co-founded by Amanda along with her collaborators Ben Miller and Jill Belli, earned the prestigious Kairos award for service to the computers and writing community.
Amanda previously taught as an instructor at NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study, Marywood University, Wilkes University, and King’s College. During her time as a doctoral student as the Graduate Center, CUNY, she was a graduate teaching fellow at BMCC and an Instructional Technology Fellow through the Macaulay Honors College. At the Graduate Center she completed my certificate in Interactive Technology and Pedagogy, was the co-director of the CUNY Digital Humanities Initiative, and was formerly the co-chair of the GC Composition & Rhetoric Group.
Follow Amanda on twitter @amandalicastro.