Karen Head Receives Georgia Tech's Class of 1934 Outstanding Service Award

Posted March 26, 2019

The Georgia Tech Faculty Honors Committee has awarded the Class of 1934 Outstanding Service Award to  Karen Head, executive director of the Naugle Communication Center and the associate chair and associate professor in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication (LMC).

The committee was impressed by Head’s distinguished record of service to Georgia Tech, as well as her contributions to the Atlanta community and beyond. She will receive the award at the 2019 Faculty and Staff Honors Luncheon, which will be held on Friday, April 19, 2019. 

Since 2006, Head has been a Visiting Scholar at Technische Universität-Dortmund, Germany, where she serves as the primary consultant for their academic center. Her research areas focus on writing and communication theory and pedagogical practice, especially in the following areas: higher education rhetoric, sustainable and innovative pedagogy and space design implementation, development of writing centers, writing program administration, communication ecologies, technical communication, business communication, multidisciplinary communication, and creative writing. She has published four books of poetry and serves as the editor of Southern Discourse in the Center: A Journal of Multiliteracy and Innovation. In summer 2016, she became the editor of the international poetry journal, Atlanta Review.

In 2012-13, she was part of the Georgia Tech team awarded a Gates Foundation Grant to develop one of the first Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) focused on college writing, and she has published several articles about the experience. Her book Disrupt This!: MOOCs and the Promises of Technology (University Press of New England, 2017) describes her experience teaching a MOOC and the attendant pressure on professors, especially those in the humanities, to embrace new technologies in the STEM era.

Head teaches courses centering on analyzing, critiquing, evaluating, and creating a variety of texts that demonstrate an understanding of audience and adaptation of multimodal and multiliteracy rhetorical strategies and tools.