Meet Dr. Erin Branch, Associate Teaching Professor, Writing, and Director of Wake Forest Writing Program

Writing has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember. After four years at Middlebury College, where I majored in English, I taught English both in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam and at a private school in rural Virginia. Those experiences taught me that I had much more to learn before I could teach well, so I returned to graduate school. At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, I fell in love with teaching writing and with the study of rhetoric. Upon graduation, I was incredibly fortunate to be hired to teach in what was then the new Writing Program at Wake Forest. 

For the last seven years, I’ve taught dozens of sections of WRI 111, along with a handful of gateway and upper level courses in rhetoric and writing. I love the challenge of introducing students to academic writing, and I love watching students learn to see writing as a tool they can use to see what they think and why. I was thrilled, last year, to take over the Directorship of the Writing Program from the Program’s founder. I continue to write and occasionally publish in my home field of rhetoric and composition. My articles on Julia Child, MFK Fisher, and other women food writers have appeared in Rhetoric Society Quarterly and in edited collections; I am also working on a book, tentatively titled Transforming Tastes, examining the intersections of gender and genre in 20th century American food writing.