Rate My Professor mary boland

Mary Boland is a Full Professor in Composition and Rhetoric at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York (CSI, CUNY), where she has directed the Writing Program since 2019. She also serves as co-chair of the CUNY Writing Discipline Council. Her academic background includes a PhD and an MA in English (Composition and Rhetoric) from the University of Rochester, a JD from Duke University School of Law, and a BA in Literature and Rhetoric from the State University of New York at Binghamton. Throughout her career, Boland has focused on the institutional treatment of Writing Programs and faculty working conditions. Her research examines how placing First-Year Writing in General Education as a skill-based course limits its subject matter depth, academic freedom, and professional standards for instructors. As Writing Program Director, she advances faculty professional development, curriculum co-ownership, and pedagogical theory. Key grant-funded projects include a six-hour corequisite English 111P replacing non-credit developmental courses, Open Educational Resources (OER) for English 111 and 151, and a nine-week reading group on antiracist writing pedagogies. She promotes a university-wide literacy culture with writing integrated across the curriculum and disciplines, recognizing diverse literacies developed in communities through supported immersion.

In her teaching, Boland positions writing as an empowering tool for students at all levels, emphasizing agency, inquiry, rhetorical awareness, and self-reflection. Her courses cover first-year writing, writing in the public sphere, literacy studies, nature and environmental writing, non-fiction analysis, English for the secondary classroom, law, language and society, contemporary composition and discourse theory, teaching writing, writing across the curriculum and disciplines, and research perspectives in English Studies. Boland's scholarly interests further include the 20th-century historical interplay of constitutional, eugenic, and feminist discourses shaping 14th Amendment rights.