Dr. Candace Epps-Robertson is a writer, researcher, and educator. She has twenty years of experience in a range of community and higher education settings, supporting and leading efforts in community building, curriculum development, instructional design, professional development, and writing across the lifespan. Her research areas include social justice, cultural rhetorics, literacy, and writing studies. She is particularly interested in research that supports culturally relevant pedagogies and thinking critically about how communities teach, practice, and understand what it means to be citizens locally and globally. Her first book, Resisting Brown: Race, Literacy, and Citizenship in the Heart of Virginia, examined a literacy program designed to aid students in becoming global citizens during the American civil rights movement. This book won the 2019 Coalition for Community Writing Book award.
Her current research and writing investigate fandom and popular music as a nexus for transcultural exchange. Her research is driven by a desire to understand how people learn to be present in the world. How do communities teach, practice, and understand what it means to be a citizen? How do we use language to build communities, resist oppression, and seek joy? How does this learning occur across different spaces and throughout our lives?
She is working on several projects creatively connecting her interests in literacy, rhetoric, citizenship, and pedagogy. One of these projects examines public pedagogies and literacy practices that support global citizenship education. Through exploring BTS, a renowned Korean band, and their global fandom, ARMY, she is working to understand the possibilities for global citizenship education to occur across languages, borders, and cultures. She is also working with a team to create the #BTSSyllabus, a resource to support those teaching and researching BTS. For more on her current projects, please see the descriptions listed here.
In addition to research, writing, and teaching, Dr. Epps-Robertson collaborates to support writers through online writing groups and programs.
Dr. Epps-Robertson is an associate professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
If you have questions, or wish to connect please contact me.
Candace Epps-Robertson, Ph.D. 