Gavin P. Johnson

Gavin P. Johnson (he/him/his) is a scholar-teacher specializing in multimodal composition, queer rhetorics, surveillance studies, critical digital studies (theory and pedagogy), and antiracist/antioppressive writing assessment. He works as the Director of Writing and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Literature and Languages at Texas A&M University-Commerce. At A&M-Commerce, he coordinates the Core Curriculum (general education) academic writing program, mentors doctoral students, and teaches graduate and undergraduate courses. 

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.

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 2020-2022, Gavin 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 two long-haired dachshunds, Bowie and Archie. He is a proud first generation college graduate.