About Me

A black and white photo of
Cara Marta Messina. She is a white, cis woman with short brown hair. She is looking in a mirror putting on blush. She has a tattoo on her left shoulder of Eowyn from Lord of The Rings.

Dr. Cara Marta Messina [she/her/hers]

Assistant Professor in English, Jacksonville State University

Digital Rhetoric
Fan Studies
Game Studies
Writing & Rhetoric of Code
Feminism, Anti-Racism, & Social Justice
Digital Humanities
Critical Digital Pedagogy

Research

My research meets at the intersection of feminism, fan studies, digital rhetoric, game studies, rhetorical genre studies, and critical digital pedagogy. My current manuscript, Writing Critical Fandoms: Tracing Representations of Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Fanfiction explores critical fan uptakes in fanfiction, or specifically how fans challenge heternormativity, racism, and ableism in their fanfiction composing practices. This manuscript is a revision and extension of my dissertation, The Critical Fan Toolkit, which received honorary mention for the Computers and Composition Distinguished Dissertation Award in 2021.

Pedagogy:

I received the 2019 Kairos Graduate Student Teaching Award. At Jacksonville State University, I teach courses such as Technical Writing, Speech, Writing for the Web, Writing for Podcasts, and Introduction to Game Studies. At Northeastern University, I taught online Writing for Social Media course. I have also taught First Year Writing and Advanced Writing in the Disciplines at St. John's University and Northeastern University. In my FYW courses, which you can read more about here, I integrate fan practices to empower and engage students so they think critically about how narratives may reinforce or challenge racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and ableism.

Previous experience

Assistant Director of the Digital Teaching Integration, part of Northeastern University's College of Social Sciences and Humanities initiative to better integrate digital tools, methods, and research in classrooms across the disciplines.
Coordinator of the NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks
President of the English Graduate Student Association from 2018-2019
Led the Feminist Coding Collective, formerly the Digital Feminist Commons, at Northeastern University and helped create the current Mission Statement and Code of Conduct
Lead organizer for the 2019 English Graduate Student Association Graduate Student Conference titled "Centering the Margins"
Research Associate for Design for Diversity, an IMLS-grant funded national forum project, at Northeastern’s Digital Scholarship Group. I helped organize the Opening Forum event in October 2017 and Closing Forum event in 2018 as well as helped build the Design for Diversity Teaching and Learning Toolkit
Research Associate for the Pedagogy and Infrastructure Teams for the Women Writers Vector Toolkit