The Joan Rosen Fellowship Program

Joan Rosen taught in the Oakland University English Department for 39 years, first as a Lecturer, later as a Special Instructor, and finally as an Associate Professor with tenure. She also served on numerous committees within the Department and as the Department Chair.

Upon being hired in 1963, Rosen’s first task was to create a center where students could seek help with their papers. She and Rosalie Flicker ran OU’s first writing center, training English majors to work as tutors. The center underwent many transitions during Rosen’s tenure, shifting between Provost and CAS supervision as well as broadening the tutoring focus from English to rhetoric and writing. Although this iteration of the writing center eventually closed, Rosen and her colleague Wilma Garcia were instrumental in laying the foundation for OU’s current writing center, which opened in 2006 with a generous donation from Rosen, now Professor Emerita, and her husband Robert.

Prior to working at OU, Professor Rosen taught at Kingswood School, Cranbrook. There, she met Gertrude White, who convinced her to attend graduate school at Wayne State University. At the same time, White suggested that she apply to the OU English Department for a position as a lecturer.

More than a decade after teaching her last class on our campus, Rosen’s vision for the center and generous financial support foster an environment that daily supports all campus writers and that recognizes faculty-student collaboration via programs like the Rosen Fellowships featured on this site.

Writing center work is inherently collaborative. Consultants seek to complement writers' subject matter knowledge with their own understanding of the writing process and the academic and professional discourse communities in which writers compose. As this synthesis occurs, consultees refine their writing abilities.

We hope to observe a similar relationship between the faculty and undergraduate researchers involved in this project, with mentors modeling how they construct knowledge within specific genres and students extending these lessons within sponsored and their own research agendas.