Gavin P. Johnson

Gavin P. Johnson (he/him/his) is a scholar-teacher specializing in digital and multimodal composition, queer rhetorics, surveillance studies, critical university studies, and antiracist/antioppressive writing assessment. 

In fall 2025, Gavin joined the Department of English at Texas Christian University as Director of Composition and advanced assistant professor of rhetoric and composition. He teaches both graduate and undergraduate courses and is available to mentor students with research curiosities in rhetoric & writing, surveillance & higher education, queer & cultural rhetorics, antioppressive pedagogy & assessment, and digital in/humanities & infrastructures. As the Director of Composition, he oversees the TCU Composition Program and coordinates the Core Curriculum Written Communication courses (English 10803 and 20803), which serve every student at TCU as they develop as critical thinkers and communicators.

Gavin's scholarship is primarily concerned with the material-digital-discursive interactions between bodies (human and non-human) and infrastructures of power. His writing has been published or is forthcoming in journals such as Computers and Composition, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, College English, Composition Studies, Technical Communication, Communication Design Quarterly, Literacy in Composition Studies, WPA: Writing Program Administration, Peitho, College Literacy and Learning, Pre/Text: A Journal of Rhetorical Theory, Constellations, Teacher-Scholar-Activist, and various edited collections including The Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Feminist Rhetorics (2025), Narratives of Joy and Failure in Antiracist Assessment (2024), The Routledge Handbook of Queer Rhetoric (2022), Failure Pedagogies: Learning and Unlearning What It Means to Fail (2020), and Privacy Matters: Conversations about Surveillances Within and Beyond the Classroom (2021). He discussed his research and teaching on the podcasts Pedagogue (ep. 79) and The Big Rhetorical Podcast.

Gavin is expanding his profile as an editor. His editorial philosophy is grounded in respecting the intellectual labor of researchers and striving for antiracist publishing in the field. He has co-edited special issues of journals (Peitho, fall 2024; WPA, fall 2026) and is leading two edited collection projects. He serves as a managing editor at Composition Forum, an independent open-access peer reviewed journal focused on writing theory and pedagogy, and is the founding section editor of Multimodal + Justice + Action, a pedagogical companion to the Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics..

His research, teaching, and service has received institutional and national attention. Recently, he and co-author Laura L. Allen won the Ellen Nold Award for Outstanding Article in Computers and Composition Studies for their article "Driving Innovation: Analyzing Mobile Ridesharing App Interfaces and Moving Towards Community-Based User Experience (CBX)" (Technical Communication, 70(4), 2023). His dissertation, Queer Possibilities in Digital Media Composing, was recognized with the 2021 Lavender Rhetorics Dissertation Award for Excellence in Queer Scholarship as well as an Honorable Mention from Computers and Composition's Hugh Burns Best Dissertation Award. His research and service have also won the 2017 CCCC Gloria Anzaldúa Rhetorician Award, the 2019 Kairos Service Award (as a member of the nextGEN international listserv start-up team), and the 2020 Ohio State Department of English Digital Media Prize for Outstanding Graduate Work. For his innovative teaching, he won the 2018 Eric Walborn Award for Excellence in Digital Media and English Instruction from the Ohio State Department of English.

He is a founding member of the Digital Rhetorical Privacy Collective (DRPC) advisory board. The DRPC was awarded one of only three NCTE/CCCC Emergent Researcher Grants for 2022-2023. For their work creating online resources for teaching about privacy and surveillance as well as its week-long, inter-institutional Privacy Week event, the DRPC won the 2024 Michelle Kendrick Award in Computers and Composition Studies and the 2024 Kairos John Lovas Award.

Gavin teaches undergrad and graduate courses in composition studies, research methods, multimodal writing, cultural rhetorics, teaching with technology, service-learning/community engagement, and critical digital studies. He is invested in creating learning spaces where students can share and expand their knowledges and work on and against dangerously oppressive institutional logics. With students, he works to collaboratively delink learning and assessment practices from dangerous colonial, racist, sexist, classist, ablest, cis-heteronormative traditions. You can read about his approach to assessment in constellations: a cultural rhetorics publishing space.

From 2022-2025, Gavin worked as an assistant professor and the Director of Writing at East Texas A&M University (formerly Texas A&M University-Commerce). From 2020-2022, he worked as an assistant professor at Christian Brothers University in Memphis, TN, where he coordinated the Professional Writing Certificate. He completed his PhD at The Ohio State University (2020) where he served as co-associate director of the international Digital Media and Composition Institute (DMAC). He earned his MA from North Carolina State University (2015) and BA from Nicholls State University (2013). Gavin was born and raised in southeast Louisiana, but currently lives in east Texas, with his partner, Aaron, and long-haired dachshund, Archie. He is a proud first generation college graduate.