Dr. Mika Turim-Nygren earned her PhD in English from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2020. She has been teaching academic writing since 2005, and is currently an instructor in the Georgetown Writing Program.
Academic Writing Philosophy
I believe that good writing not only connects us to our audience, but also to intellectual truth. The process of writing produces new ways of thinking by allowing us to trace the contours of ideas and arrange them in meaningful relation to one another. So often, we don’t fully realize what we believe until we try to put it into words. As an editor, my role is to think along with you, drawing forth the core of your agument until it crystallizes into its most cogent form.
Academic Writing Methodology
The University of Chicago
Little Red Schoolhouse
The Little Red Schoolhouse approach frames writing through the experience of the reader, with a particular focus on helping academics be understood by audiences outside their field. It emphasizes concrete language, straightforward syntax, and easy-to-follow organization.
University of Illinois at Chicago
Situated Writing; They Say, I Say
Situated Writing frames effective composition as a matter of meeting unspoken genre conventions. To that end, Gerald Graff’s influential textbook They Say, I Say outlines the fundamental structure of academic writing in terms of entering into conversation with previous scholarship.
Bard College
Writing and Thinking
The Writing and Thinking method frames composition as a continuous, collaborative practice that helps us understand our object of study by exploring our own responses to it. It de-mystifies the process of critical inquiry by encouraging scholars to trust their own impulses of curiosity and confusion.
Academic Writing Experience
American Literature Faculty — Bard High School Early College DC
(2020 – 2021)
Designed and implemented original composition curricula using a variety of Writing and Thinking methods with a high degree of differentiation and a strong focus on diversity and inclusion.
Graduate Instructor — University of Illinois at Chicago
(2014 – 2018)
Created and taught four original composition courses that integrated Situated Writing methods to familiarize first-generation and immigrant undergraduates with a wide range of academic genres.
Adjunct Instructor — Roosevelt University
(2010 – 2011)
Developed and taught two composition courses oriented toward producing original scholarship and research.
Writing Tutor — AIM Program at the University of Florida
(2005 – 2009)
Tutored incoming freshmen from non-traditional college backgrounds on the fundamentals of successful academic writing.
Academic Writing Publications
“Bret Harte’s Birtherism: Dialect Literature and the Fantasy of the Native-Born Citizen.” Nonsite 36 (“The Legal Issue”): August 2021.
“Twain’s Modernism: The Death of Speech in Huckleberry Finn as the Birthof a New Aesthetic.” The Journal of 19th-Century Americanists (J19) 8.1: Spring 2020.
Dr. Mika Turim-Nygren 