Lucas Johnston

Faculty Co-Director 2011

Lucas Johnston teaches in the Department of Religion and the Environmental Program at Wake Forest.  He earned his Ph.D. in Religion and Nature from the University of Florida with concentrations in sustainability, environmental ethics, and the religious dimensions of contemporary social movements.  He also holds a graduate certificate in environmental ethics from the University of Georgia, an M.A. in theology from the Graduate Theological Union (Berkeley, CA) and a B.A. in psychology from Wake Forest University.  He currently serves as the assistant editor and book reviews editor of the Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture, is the volunteer coordinator for the WFU campus garden, and in his spare time enjoys backpacking and sampling locally grown foods.

Ryan Shirey

Faculty Co-Director 2011

Ryan D. Shirey, Lecturer in the Writing Program and Interim Director of the Wake Forest University Writing Center, earned his A.M. and Ph.D. in English and American Literature (with a Graduate Certificate in the Teaching of College Writing) at Washington University in St. Louis and his B.A. at Albion College. Shirey specializes in modern British and Scottish literatures, writing studies, writing across the curriculum, writing center pedagogy, and digital humanities. His forthcoming publications include scholarly articles on the Scottish novelists John Buchan and Neil Gunn, and his recent conference presentations have included such topics as Alfred Hitchcock’s 1930s spy thrillers and using “LOLcats” to address ideas of error and writing conventions in the college composition classroom. Since January 2010 Ryan has served as Interim Director of the Writing Center, where he has been engaged in, among other things, training student tutors to be good, critically-responsive audiences for the writing of their peers.