Welcome! My name is Justiss Wilder Burry, and I’m currently an Assistant Professor, School of Writing, Rhetoric and Technical Communication at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia.
Currently, I’m working with trans-national colleagues to examine ways rural health and rhetoric interoperate because of my experiences as queer, gay, first-gen faculty. I love to read and research in the rhetoric of health and medicine (RHM) field, particularly around marginalized community-based engagement methodologies and medicinal legislative law. Through my research, I’ve developed a theory poignantly labeled collective mētis (ask if you want to know more!). I also specialize in teaching technical and professional communication (TPC) service courses that primarily serve engineering, allied health science, and business majors along with programmatic evaluation and improvement. I hold that SLOs are key to successful TPC contexts. I also teach undergraduate and graduate courses in rhetoric such as executive writing, writing, gender, and sexuality, and discourse studies. These courses aim to increase student understanding and awareness of workplace writing skills and rhetorical strategies through course outcomes curated through evidence-driven research.
Please feel free to look around this e-portfolio and email me at wyf4gl@jmu.edu (yes, seriously!) if you have any questions!
“Rhetoric encourages scholars to seek out opportunities that speak to their research interests while contributing to established and emerging fields. RHM, as a field, engenders community-building practices for rhetoricians by enacting their place in a community of scholars” (Burry & Melonçon, 2024).
In TPC, expanding the field is a major goal. “Equity, we argue, addresses considerations of fairness in the distribution of resources to historically underrepresented populations.” (Veeramoothoo & Agboka, 2024).
Justiss Wilder Burry 