Dr. Olinger joined the faculty in 2014 after receiving her PhD in English with a specialization in Writing Studies from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She directed the Watson Conference on Rhetoric and Composition from 2020-2025. Her scholarship articulates a sociocultural approach to the study of writing styles and explores the role of the body in writers’ talk and interaction. Her areas of interest include writing across the curriculum/writing in the disciplines, writing teacher development, linguistic and semiotic ideologies, methods of discourse analysis, qualitative research, and second language writing. A selection of her work can be found on her institutional repository page.