Biography
Jackson Tucker (JT) has composition and rhetoric at Montgomery College and UMBC, among other places, on and off since 2008. He holds a BA in English and Geography from West Virginia University, an MFA in Creative Writing from Georgia College, and an MA in Language, Literacy, and Culture from UMBC. His professional background includes editorial work with the American Library Association and Macmillan Learning, as well as international debate and democracy training in partnership with the Open Society Foundations. He has received fellowships from the NEH, MLA, and RSA. His current research interests include how queer communities build solidarity through food, drawing on rhetoric, decolonial theory, critical food studies, and queer theory, as well as a rhetorical study of rats.
I am trained in rhetoric and writing studies, and I approach writing not as a static skill set but as a meta-disciplinary practice: a way of thinking, analyzing, and intervening in the world.
My teaching and consulting expertise includes:
Rhetorical theory (classical, global, and decolonial traditions)
Argumentation and source synthesis
Research design and academic literacy
AI ethics, authorship, and digital writing
Writing in the workplace and rhetorics of labor
Curriculum design grounded in threshold concepts and recursive learning
In the classroom, I design courses that foreground rhetoric as a practical tool for navigating contemporary life—particularly at the intersections of technology, labor, identity, and community. My pedagogy emphasizes critical inquiry, rhetorical listening, and the ethical circulation of knowledge.
Beyond academia, I collaborate with arts organizations and community partners on grant writing, public humanities initiatives, and strategic communication projects that bridge scholarship and civic life.
Professional History
Personal History
I was born in Weirton, WV in 1984 to union steelworkers. I am very proud of my working class background, as it has informed everything that I do — both my teaching and my scholarship.
When the pandemic hit…
Jackson Tucker (JT) became Part-time Faculty at Montgomery College, where he taught composition, argumentative, creative, and technical writing courses off and on beginning in 2008. He earned a BA in English and Geography (2007) from West Virginia University, followed by an MFA in Creative Writing (2010) from Georgia College, and later an MA in Language, Literacy, and Culture (2025) from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
I bring over fifteen years of experience designing writing and rhetoric curricula grounded in conceptual rigor, intellectual transparency, and student agency. My pedagogy is informed by writing studies research, particularly threshold concepts and recursive models of composing, and by critical traditions that position education as a site of inquiry rather than compliance.
I treat college writing not as remediation or rule enforcement, but as disciplinary initiation. Students in my courses learn to understand writing as socially situated, epistemologically complex, and materially consequential. I foreground rhetorical analysis, research design, and source synthesis while making the conventions of academic discourse visible and interrogable.
My courses frequently engage themes such as labor, technology, food systems, identity, and community formation—inviting students to apply rhetorical frameworks to the material conditions shaping their lives. I integrate discussions of AI, authorship, and digital literacy into writing instruction, equipping students to navigate contemporary technological environments with both analytical precision and ethical awareness.
Across levels—from first-year writing to advanced courses in rhetoric—I emphasize dialogue, structured intellectual risk-taking, and the cultivation of transferable meta-knowledge about writing. My classrooms are rigorous, theory-informed spaces designed to foster critical agency and sustained engagement.
After completing graduate study, Tucker moved to New York, where he worked as an editor for the American Library Association and Bedford/St. Martin’s–Macmillan Learning. In affiliation with the Open Society Foundations, he trained youth in debate and deliberative democracy skills, both in the United States and abroad in Hungary, Slovakia, and Ireland. He also developed instructional books on these topics and managed the organization’s publishing program. During this period, he secured a United Nations Democracy Fund grant to oversee the translation of debate and public speaking resources, further extending the reach of his educational and rhetorical work.
For his research, Tucker was recognized with several major fellowships. He won the Publicly Engaged Research and Storywork Fellowship from UMBC’s LLC program (2023–2024 academic year), which supported travel to Bogotá, Colombia. He also received an MLA Summer Institute Fellowship for Reading & Writing Pedagogy at Access-Oriented Institutions (June 2024) and a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Fellowship to attend the Rustbelt Institute (June 2023) at Ursuline College. In summer 2024, he attended the Rhetoric Society of America Summer Institute as part of the Queer Rhetorics group. He had also been selected for the 2025 NEH Summer Institute, Visual Wests, at the University of Oklahoma, but the program was cancelled following the dismantling of the NEH earlier that year.
Tucker’s research explored how queer communities built solidarity and belonging through food, drawing on rhetoric, American studies, decoloniality, critical food studies, and queer theory. He investigated sites of queer resistance and liberation, particularly as they related to community-building strategies and practices of commensality.
Jackson Tucker is now a UNIDEL Distinguished Graduate Fellow at the University of Delaware, where he is pursuing a PhD in English. His current work focuses on the intersections of the rhetorics of care and community with non-human animal rhetorics and decolonial theory.