Dr. Lisa Russell-Pinson

Lisa Russell-Pinson, Ph.D. is Associate Teaching Professor of Writing. In this position, she creates and teaches academic writing courses designed for matriculated graduate students. In addition to teaching writing courses within the Graduate School, Dr. Russell-Pinson develops and delivers support programming for doctoral-level writers at the university. She also works with doctoral faculty to create initiatives and revise curricula to meet the needs of the student writers in their programs.

Dr. Russell-Pinson’s areas of expertise include academic writing, English as a second/foreign language (ESL/EFL) in higher education settings, written medical discourse, and affective factors in the writing process. Her current research focuses on doctoral students’ experiences in the dissertation process, especially factors that impede dissertation-writing progress and interventions that help writers succeed. Her most recent work on this topic appears in the Journal of Second Language Writing and the volume Learning from the Lived Experiences of Graduate Student Writers. Dr. Russell-Pinson has also presented her research at a variety of academic conferences, including AAAL, AACL, AERA, CGC Summer Institute, the Conference on Writing & Well-Being, GURT, SSLW, and TESOL.

Dr. Russell-Pinson regularly serves as a peer reviewer for manuscripts, book chapters, research articles, and conference proposals. Additionally, she is a former Member at Large on the Executive Board for the Consortium on Graduate Communication (2018-2020), as well as past co-editor of TESOL’s ESP-IS Newsletter (2000-2003).

Over the past 25 years, Dr. Russell-Pinson has taught English and ESL in community college and university settings in the U.S. and EFL in Spain, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Germany; she spent Summer 2019 teaching academic writing to EFL graduate students in Tbilisi, Georgia. Dr. Russell-Pinson has also contributed to many language-related projects and teacher-training initiatives: She has worked as a contract content developer, developmental editor, and writer for TOEFL and Praxis I test preparation resources, ESL and English grammar materials, and ESL teacher-training curriculum projects. In addition to these educational publishing initiatives, Dr. Russell-Pinson has consulted on a number of other projects, including the evaluation of a university-level academic writing program, the development of a collection of lesson plans designed for ESL community-college students, and the assessment of patient-oriented health materials produced by non-profit organizations.

Dr. Russell-Pinson earned her Ph.D. and M.S. in Linguistics from Georgetown University and her B.A. cum laude in English from the University of South Carolina at Columbia. Prior to her work in the Graduate School, Dr. Russell-Pinson completed a postdoctoral fellowship under the mentorship of Dr. Boyd Davis in the Department of English. She has also taught in the Department of English, the Department of Middle, Secondary, and K-12 Education, and the English Language Training Institute at UNC Charlotte.

Dr. Russell-Pinson is available by appointment only. Please email her directly at Lisa.Russell-Pinson@uncc.edu to arrange a time.

Please visit Dr. Russell-Pinson’s comprehensive list of graduate writing resources at UNC Charlotte!