Kristi Murray Costello, Ph.D. is the Associate Chair of Writing Studies and General Education and an Associate Professor of Rhetoric, Composition, and Writing Studies at Old Dominion University. Her areas of expertise include composition pedagogy and history, writing program administration, writing center studies, Writing Across the Curriculum, Writing in the Disciplines, feminist composition, affect theory and rhetorics of emotion, and creative nonfiction. In addition to teaching courses in the areas listed above, she recently co-taught an interdisciplinary course on the hip-hop musical Hamilton titled, “Who Tells Your Story: Race, Rhetoric, and the Revolution.” Kristi is Co-PI on a National Science Foundation grant as well as a participating researcher on The Citation Project and an NSDA-funded writing support project for students and faculty in the sciences and agriculture. Kristi is the four-year college president of the Virginia WPA regional affiliate Writing Across Virginia, and she was named Arkansas’ College English Teacher of the Year by the Arkansas Council of Teachers of English and Language Arts for 2016-2017.

Kristi is an editor of the Utah State University Press collection, The Things We Carry: Strategies for Recognizing and Negotiating Emotional Labor in Writing Program Administration, co-edited alongside Courtney Adams Wooten, Jacob Babb, and Kate Navickas. She has published articles and reviews in Composition Forum, The Peer Review, The Journal of Multimodal Rhetoric, Kairos, Women in Higher Education, and the WPA Journal, among others. She has served as an Associate Editor on two editions of Parlor Press’ Best of the Journals in Rhetoric and Composition and has chapters in several edited collections, including Christian Weisser, Michelle Ballif, Anis Bawarshi, Mary Jo Reiff’s Ecologies of Writing Programs: Profiles of Writing Programs in Context and Tricia Serviss and Sandra Jamieson’s Points of Departure: Rethinking Student Source Use and Writing Studies Research Methods.

Kristi has served as a WPA of many different kinds of writing programs (Bridge, Basic Writing, living learning communities, First-Year Composition, WAC/WID, writing centers, and Writing Studies). Alongside Kelly Kinney and Mark Brantner, she was a recipient of the 2011 Conference on Composition and Communication’s prestigious Certificate of Writing Program Excellence for her work leading the Binghamton University Writing Initiative. In 2017, alongside Airek Beauchamp, she was awarded honorable mention for the Certificate of Writing Program Excellence for their work creating the Campus Writing Program at Arkansas State University.

When Kristi is not working, reading, or writing, she enjoys hiking, cycling, listening to records, attending concerts, and hanging out with her partner and their dogs.

Want to learn more about writing at ODU? Visit our website.