Christina Santana is an Associate Professor English at Worcester State University. She earned her doctorate at Arizona State University in 2016, specializing community writing, rhetorics, and literacies. Her professional life has included time spent as Writing Center Director at WSU, an Associate Director of Community Learning in the Center for Community Engagement at Amherst College, and as a Visiting Lecturer at University of Massachusetts Amherst, teaching “Learning through Community Engagement” out of the office of Civic Engagement and Service Learning.
Her teaching has largely focused on capacity-building for professional writing. Christina currently teaches courses on community writing, writing consultancy, persuasive writing about public issues, professional writing, and business communication, and was a co-winner of the Alden Excellence in Teaching Award (2020).
Christina’s scholarship has explored innovative, collaborative structures and frameworks in several contexts, including connecting composition mega courses, facilitating the work of writing groups/teams across difference, networking writing centers and organizations within a city, and advancing anti-racist community engagement in and around higher education. Her writing scholarship has appeared in Innovative Developments in Writing Studio Practice, Currents in Teaching and Learning, The Community Literacy Journal, and WLN: A Journal of Writing Center Scholarship. Her racial equity and anti-racist works appear in the Journal of Higher Education Theory and Practice, the book Anti-Racist Community Engagement: Principles and Practices, for which she was the lead editor and project manager, the Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning and soon “Through the Lens: Perspectives of Educational Developers of Color,” an edited collection. She is a proud member of the New England Equity Engagement Consortium and is on the team that won the 2023 IARSLCE Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Award.
She is also a graduate of the Leadership Worcester program (2018) and enjoys working collaboratively – especially across different experience and expertise – and on projects that enable/empower others to contribute to the common good.
