Professor of Composition Theory and Research, Associate Dean of the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences

• B.A., English, Maryville College
• M.A.T, English and Education, University of North Carolina
• Ph.D, English and Education, University of Michigan

In addition to his teaching, Lee Odell is heavily involved in the core curriculum at HASS, establishing and maintaining communication requirements, and heading up a task that is overhauling the core curriculum.  

 “My main scholarly interest currently is in solving a problem increasingly faced by ‘writing’ teachers,” Odell said. “Writing courses now routinely involve not only written media but video and other forms of multimedia that, on the face of it, are substantially different from conventional prose essays. Currently I am developing a theoretical framework that will allow writing teachers to integrate the teaching and assessment of the full range of communicative media, from written essays to web sites, poster presentations, and videos.”

 His published work includes Evaluating Writing, Research on Composing, Writing in Non-Academic Settings and Theory and Practice in the Teaching of Writing.

He has served as Chair of the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) and of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) Assembly for Research.

He serves on a number of editorial boards of scholarly journals, including the Journal of Business and Technical Communication and the Journal of Advanced Composition. His articles have received the CCCC Richard Braddock Award and the NCTE Publication Award for research on technical communication.