Suzanne Lane is Senior Lecturer in Rhetoric and Communication, and Director of the
Writing, Rhetoric, and Professional Communication (WRAP) program. As an undergraduate at MIT, she studied Chemical Engineering, and after working as a research engineer for a couple of oil companies, she studied writing in graduate school, at the University of Colorado (Master's), and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst (PhD). Her dissertation research applied genre theory and discourse analysis to fugitive slave narratives and academic histories of slavery, and defined narrative forms of argumentation that enslaved Americans developed to counter the dominant justifications for slavery.
Before joining MIT, she taught at Harvard, where she was also a researcher on the Harvard Study of Undergraduate Writing. In that research, she explored how students learn discipline-specific genres and forms of argumentation, and transfer them to new locations.
Suzanne also co-directs ArchiMedia, a research lab that investigates how digital media is shaping professional communication practices, and how digital tools can be used (and designed) to teach professional communication.
