UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Stuart Selber, Penn State associate professor of English, has received the Ken Rainey Award for Excellence in Research from the Society for Technical Communication (STC). Selber received his award at the honors ceremony closing STC’s annual conference on May 23 in Orlando, Florida.
STC is the world’s largest and oldest professional association dedicated to the advancement of the field of technical communication. The organization honored Selber with its annual Ken Rainey Award for Excellence in Research to recognize his lifetime of research contributions to the technical communication field. The award is named in memory of Ken Rainey, a Southern Polytechnic State University professor and STC Fellow.
Selber is a researcher and teacher in the overlapping fields of technical communication, computers and composition, and human-computer interaction. Combining the most productive aspects of humanist critical traditions and social science methods, he studies the applications and implications of digital technologies for writing and communication purposes. Selber is especially interested in the social dimensions of literacies and in heuristics for conceptualizing instructional and institutional contexts.
Within the Department of English, Selber serves as director of digital education and director of the Penn State Digital English Studio. In these capacities, he designs socio-technical infrastructures to support the digital endeavors of both individuals and academic programs. Outside of his home department, Selber is a faculty fellow in the Teaching and Learning with Technology unit and an affiliate professor in the College of Information Sciences and Technology.
Selber is past president and Fellow of the Association of Teachers of Technical Writing, past president of the Council for Programs in Technical and Scientific Communication, past chair of the Conference on College Composition and Communication Committee on Technical Communication, and past chair of the Association for Computing Machinery’s SIGDOC Conference. He has won several additional awards for his research from the National Council of Teachers of English, the Association of Teachers of Technical Writing, and Computers and Composition: An International Journal, among others.