Mary Jane Curry

Associate Professor
Teaching & Curriculum

Joining the Warner School faculty in 2003, Mary Jane Curry teaches courses in language education, literacy, and academic writing and publishing. Her doctoral seminars have focused on critical literacy, language and literacy across cultures, and language, literacy, and globalization.

Curry’s research explores various facets of academic discourse as a barrier or form of cultural capital for users of English as an additional language and other types of “non-traditional” learners. Since 2001, she has conducted funded research on the experiences of scholars and graduate students writing for journal publication. First, she examined the English academic writing and publishing of southern and central European scholars, and more recently, she has been studying the experiences of engineers, particularly women, in publishing research. In a second strand of research undertaken while a research fellow at the Open University Centre for Language and Communications at Milton Keynes, U.K., Curry explored the academic literacy experiences of non-traditional U.K. students taking distance access courses taught over the telephone, work that connected to her dissertation research on immigrant community college students in an academic writing course.

Curry is the co-author of A Scholar’s Guide to Getting Published in English: Critical Choices and Practical Strategies (Multilingual Matters, 2013), Academic Writing in a Global Context: The Politics and Practices of Publishing in English (Routledge, 2010) and Teaching Academic Writing: A Toolkit for Higher Education (Routledge, 2002). She is co-editor of  Language, Literacy, and Learning in STEM Education: Research Methods and Perspectives from Applied Linguistics (John Benjamins, 2014); Global Academic Publishing: Policies, Perspectives, and Pedagogies (Multilingual Matters, 2018); and Educating Refugee-background Students: Critical Issues and Dynamic Contexts (Multilingual Matters, 2018). She has written articles, reviews, and book chapters on teaching English as a second language, the experiences of immigrant students learning English writing at the community college, and her current research on academic publishing.

Curry is the founding director of the Warner School’s Writing Support Services, which offers students free individual consultations, ongoing workshops, and occasional writing retreats.
 

Publications Available on the Web: 
Educating Refugee-Background Students – Introduction

Global Academic Publishing – Chapter 1

The Dutch PhD Coach Book Review: A Scholar's Guide to Getting Published in English

Action Research for Preparing Reflective Language Teachers

Academic Writing in a Global Context: The Politics and Practices of Publishing in English (Routledge, 2010) - Chapter 1

• Overview
• Chapter 1 “Approaches to Teaching Writing"
• Chapter 2 “Issues in Academic Writing in Higher Education"

Courses
ED409 Language and Literacy in Education
ED513 Academic Writing for Educators
ED515A The Social Practices of Academic Journal Publishing
ED515 Writing for Scholarly Publication in the Social Sciences
ED582 Critical Literacy