Name: Leah Heilig
URI Title: Assistant Professor of Writing and Rhetoric
Email: leah_heilig@uri.edu
Pronouns: she/her/hers
Three adjectives she’d use to describe herself: straightforward, tenacious, supportive

As one of the newest members of our Harrington School of Communication and Media, Assistant Professor of Writing and Rhetoric Leah Heilig joins us from Lubbock, Texas, where she received her Ph.D. in Technical Communication and Rhetoric from Texas Tech University in 2020. “My dissertation was called Ways to Move, Ways to Map: Neurodiversity in Interaction Design, and focused on making technology more accessible to those with non-physical disabilities,” Heilig says. “The study worked with participants who self-identified as having affective disorders such as bipolar, obsessive-compulsive disorder, major depressive disorder, and variations of anxiety, and listened to their experiences and suggestions to improve mobile, interaction designs (like smartphones).” While at TTU, Heilig also taught courses in first-year writing, first-year writing for engineering majors, technical communication, and professional writing as a Graduate Part-Time Instructor, in addition to serving as the Assistant Director of the First-Year Writing program from 2018-2019.

In line with her dissertation, Heilig’s research mostly focuses on technical communication, disability studies, and accessibility/accessible design. “I’m interested in how communication design can be used to promote equity and access to a variety of people and technologies,” she says. “My main project at the moment is investigating what accessibility means for those with psychiatric or mental disabilities — a population that is heavily underserved in this area. Aside from my work in technical communication and disability studies, I’m also chipping away at some projects related to subjectivity and vulnerability in qualitative research, as well as creating a rhetorical history of Gulf War Syndrome/Illness (GWS/GWI).” She further notes that she looks forward to continuing to pursue her research interests, as well as expanding her knowledge of writing in the disciplines approaches that seek to target specific audiences and contexts.

Heilig is currently teaching WRT 332: Technical Writing during the Fall 2020 semester, and she looks forward to teaching Technical Writing again, as well as WRT 306: Writing Health and Disability in Spring 2021. As for advice to Arts and Sciences students, Heilig delves deeper into the concept of academic balance, as she states, “I think the most important thing I’ve learned is to diversify what you learn and who you learn it with. The beauty of a liberal arts education is taking classes from a variety of fields with a variety of experts in those fields. It’s exciting because there’s a real value in being able to adopt and adapt multiple ways of problem-solving in your chosen field or occupation. Taking classes as an undergraduate and graduate student in economics, political science, philosophy, and biology, to name a few, helped me improve my thinking and communication skills. These courses later prepared me for projects with experts in statistics, administration, computer science, and many other areas that are way outside of my specialization, which in turn helped me diversify my work experience.”

~ Written by Chase Hoffman, Writing & Rhetoric and Anthropology Double Major, URI Class of December 2020