Dawn Opel
Assistant Professor of Digital Media and User Experience
Pronouns: She/Her/Hers
Office: 240 Bessey Hall
Email: opeldawn@msu.edu
Websites: DawnOpel.com
aboutme.com/dawnopel
www.linkedin.com/in/dawn-opel-bb6574a2
https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=HuP7cWYAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao
Research Areas
Technical and Professional Communication, Community Literacy, Rhetoric of Health and Medicine, User Experience
Profile
Dawn is a community-engaged action researcher, and partners with nonprofit, government and healthcare organizations to improve the design of communication and coordination of patient care. Dawn’s research lies at the intersection of rhetoric, law, and policy, having previously served as a federal law clerk and lawyer with legal aid societies and other nonprofit organizations. In 2019, Dawn served as a Research Policy Fellow at the University of Michigan’s Center for Healthcare and Research Transformation. Her work is funded by grants from the Michigan Health Endowment Fund and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Administration for Community Living.
Education
PhD, Rhetoric, Composition, and Linguistics. Arizona State University. 2015.
JD, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Law. 2002.
BA, History. Wake Forest University. 1999
Representative Work
Opel, D., and Simeone, M. (2019). The invisible work of the digital humanities lab: Preparing graduate students for emergent intellectual and professional work. Digital Humanities Quarterly, 13(2).
Opel, D. & Hart-Davidson, W. (2019). The primary care clinic as writing space. Written Communication, 36(3), 348-378.
Opel, D. (2018). Challenging the rhetorical conception of health literacy: Aging, interdependence, and networked caregiving. Literacy in Composition Studies, 6(2), 136-150.
Opel, D., & Rhodes, J. (2018). Beyond student as user: Rhetoric, multimodality, and user-centered design. Computers and Composition: An International Journal, 49, 71-81.
Selected Courses Taught
WRA 878: Composition Studies: Issues, Theory, and Research
WRA 491: Medical Rhetoric and Science Writing
XA 333/AL 333: Researching Experience
WRA 331: Writing in the Public Interest
Research or Academic Affiliations
Member, Board of Directors, Coalition for Community Writing
Co-PI, Humanities Without Walls, “The Building Healthcare Collectives Project”
Food@MSU Seed Grant Researcher
Affiliate, Digital Humanities @ MSU
Joint Faculty Appointment, Hub for Innovation in Learning and Technology
Affiliate Faculty, School of Law
Member, Board of Directors, Coalition for Community Writing
Co-PI, Humanities Without Walls, “The Building Healthcare Collectives Project”
Food@MSU Seed Grant Researcher
Core Faculty, Digital Humanities @ MSU
Member, WRAC Multimodal Research Group