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Christine Sharp, Ph.D.

Director

  • Oversees all current and future Writing Hub programs and services. 
  • Develops and runs faculty workshops.
  • Provides faculty consultations for one-on-one support with writing pedagogies as well as support for their current writing projects. 
  • Consults with departments on curriculum mapping and re-design.
  • Directs research and assessment initiatives within the Writing Hub.
  • Serves on campus-wide committees.
  • Provides oversight for writing consultant hiring, training, performance feedback, and professional development.
  • Co-directs Teaching + Learning Commons initiatives with others in the Commons leadership team.

Talk to Me About

  • Gardening - raised bed gardening and nurturing wildflower gardens are a passion of mine.
  • Gothic Literature - Sci Fi, Fantasy, and Speculative fiction and media included.
  • Dancing - Salsa, cumbia, bachata, even Zumba, let's talk!

Why Writing Matters to Me (and Why I Think it Should Matter to You)

Writing is like a key that unlocks our own thoughts, enables us to connect with others, and transforms the world around us. The doors that we open through our writing provides all of us with pathways for growing in understanding and advancing our collective knowledge. We are all writers --together-- and through writing we can explore and contribute to a vast universe of emerging ideas that ultimately benefit us all. 

As the Director of Writing and Communication Learning Services at the Teaching and Learning Commons, Dr. Christine Sharp empowers writers at all levels and within all disciplines to grow in confidence and to use their voices to explore ideas, share unique perspectives, communicate within diverse discourse communities, and connect across differences.  Drawing upon her twenty years teaching writing and literature courses and ten years as a writing program  director, Dr. Sharp encourages students to communicate effectively and authentically in different settings by incorporating their voices into their creations: from papers to personal statements, from presentations to web pages, from films to lab reports, the broad ecosystem of writing and its related skills provides us all with opportunities to express our ideas, to be heard, and to belong.

 

As a Latina and first-generation college graduate, Dr. Sharp learned early on about the value of a university education as a pathway to life-long success and fulfillment. She is committed to closing opportunity gaps for all of our students at UCSD and to promoting social justice in our shared learning and work spaces. She earned her bachelor’s degree in Literature and History from Claremont McKenna College and her doctoral degree from UC Riverside, where she specialized in eighteenth-century British literature, medical discourse, and the Gothic. Her publications explore concepts such as the medical Gothic (in Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies), representations of gender and disability in the Gothic (in Body and Mind: Essays on Disability in Gothic Literature), and masculinity in the Victorian age (in The Male Body in Medicine and Literature).

 

Her research in the areas of writing pedagogy and writing studies has revealed how systemic barriers have impeded access to higher education for generations of historically excluded students and how writing centers and writing programs can expand access and enable belonging for all writers. As the former Director of Claremont McKenna’s Center for Writing and Public Discourse, Dr. Sharp was instrumental in re-shaping the college climate to promote equity, diversity, and inclusion, particularly for first-generation, low-income, and historically excluded students. Dr. Sharp believes that everyone is a writer and that writing can be a powerful tool for transformation and community; she is eager to connect with all of her fellow writers at UCSD.