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Department of

English

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Ed Lotto Associate Professor of English at Lehigh University

Edward Lotto

Associate Professor

610.758.3097
eel2@lehigh.edu
0035 - Drown Hall
Education:

PhD, Indiana University, 1980

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Research Areas

Additional Interests

  • Composition Pedagogy
  • Writing Centers
  • Cultural Studies
  • Environmental Literature
  • Fantasy Epics
  • Contemporary Literature

Biography

Ed Lotto received his Ph.D. from Indiana University in 1980.  His dissertation, under the direction of E. Talbot Donaldson, explored the epistemological use of comparisons in the medieval poem, Piers Plowman.  He then took a position at Ohio State University in their Basic Writing program.  After a year, he was named director of the program, one of the largest in the country.  In 1983 he accepted a position as director of the Learning Center at Lehigh University.  Under his direction the Center evolved into today’s Writing and Math Center.  He was awarded the National Writing Centers Association 1987 award for the outstanding article on writing centers, "The Writer's Subject is Sometimes a Fiction."  In addition, he was a member of the Executive Board of the National Writing Centers Association, and served as the editor of The Writing Center Journal from 1991-94, as well as being a referee for a number of composition journals. At Lehigh University he has served on and chaired many of the major faculty committees as well as serving as Director of the Writing Program from 1990-97 and 2006-2016.

Selected Publications

Lotto, Edward.  "The Writer's Subject is Sometimes a Fiction."  The Writing Center Journal, 6 (1985), 15-20. 

Lotto, Edward.  "Utterance and Text in Freshman English."  College English, 51 (1989), 677-687.

Lotto, Edward.  "The Lehigh University Writing Center."  Chapter in Writing Centers in Context: Twelve Case Studies.  Eds. Joyce Kinkead and Jeanette Harris.  Urbana, IL:NCTE, 1993.  Pp. 78-96.

Lotto, Edward and Richard Jenseth.  Constructing Nature: Readings from the American Experience. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1996.

Lotto, Edward. “’Written in its Own Season’: Nature as Ground in the Postmodern World.” Chapter in Ecocomposition: Theoretical and Pedagogical Approaches. Eds. Sid Dobrin and Christian Weisser.  Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2001.  Pp. 253-264.

 

Teaching

Ed Lotto specializes in composition and rhetoric, regularly teaching first-year writing. He teaches graduate courses in composition pedagogy and theory, as well as the practicum for new Teaching Fellows. He frequently teaches a course on the Environmental Imagination that seeks to explore the role of the natural world in grounding our knowledge and beliefs. On occasion he teaches a course on the contemporary American novel that sometimes considers the work the label “classic” does in our society and other times explores the American dream of freedom. Most recently he has indulged in a general education course called Visions of Evil, which examines the differing conceptions of evil in The Lord of the Rings, The Dark Materials, and Harry Potter. In all his teaching he is concerned with the role of language in shaping our world.