MA/MS in Professional and Technical Writing: Faculty

Sarah Read

Dr. Sarah Read is the Director of the Masters in Professional and Technical Writing. She earned a PhD in Language and Rhetoric with a specialization in Technical Communication from the University of Washington in 2011. She taught for six years at DePaul University in Chicago for the Department of Writing, Rhetoric & Discourse before moving to Portland in 2017 to lead the Tech/Pro program. Dr. Read's research explores how technical reporting and documentation practices serve and shape the missions of technical organizations. Her latest field site is a supercomputing center in Chicago that serves scientists from around the world. Her award-wining research has been published in Technical Communication Quarterly, The Journal of Writing Research, Journal of Business and Technical Communication, and College Composition and Communication.

Dr. Read teaches Advanced Technical Communication and Research Methods for Technical and Professional Writers. Her passion is getting students excited about the ethnographer's mission to document and make visible how technical communication powerfully shapes everyday life and organizational success.

Jacob Tootalian

Jacob Tootalian teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in Portland State’s technical writing program. He was previously a visiting faculty member and digital teaching fellow at the University of South Florida. His research interests revolve around literature, rhetoric, and the history of science, with a historical focus on early modern English culture. He is also interested in digital approaches to pedagogy, text analysis, and scholarly editing. He serves as co-director of Digital Cavendish (digicavendish.org), a scholarly collaborative exploring the work of seventeenth-century natural philosopher and poet Margaret Cavendish. His in-progress book project, Mists and Uncertainties: Poetic Figuration and English Scientific Prose, 1640–1671, examines the formal theories and textual practices of natural philosophers, alchemists, physicians, midwives, and other scientific writers at a dynamic moment in intellectual history shaped by both Renaissance humanism’s emphasis on rhetorical knowledge-making and the emerging Enlightenment’s investment in the natural sciences as the foundation for truth.