StepAside

Prof. Spigelman's work first came to my attention when my graduate students at Texas Christian University began citing it. Like Candace, I am a scholar of authorship, and as my graduate students worked in the field, they began saying to me (about her 1998 article "Habits of Mind" and the 1999 book chapter "Ethics of Appropriation"), "You should be reading this!" But I wasn't. I knew these looked like interesting essays, but my students read them before I did.

As soon as I had a chance to read them, I was impressed. These articles demonstrated careful scholarship, careful evidence for all of Spigelman's claims, with no claims exaggerated. As a scholar given to some hyperbole and drama in my own rhetoric, I was immediately respectful of Prof. Spigelman's restraint—not to mention her findings. By that time I was in my present position, at Syracuse University, and once again, my graduate students were a step ahead of me. They were devouring her 2000 Across Property Lines and insisting, "You should read this!" This time I immediately made the time to read the book, and once again, I could see why graduate students in composition and rhetoric were finding her work so illuminating and important. Candace Spigelman's publications offer methodologically sound research into the ways in which teachers' and students' images of authors, authorship, and intellectual property affect their classroom and rhetorical behaviors. From Candace Spigelman I learned, for example, the ways in which collaborative classroom pedagogies can be derailed by nearly-invisible student assumptions and worries about their own intellectual property rights and by their sense of academic competition.

Last year Amy E. Robillard finished her doctoral dissertation ("Reimagining Students' Writerly Authority") at Syracuse, and it substantially drew on Prof. Spigelman's work coediting of the journal Young Scholars in Writing. Robillard regards that journal as a benchmark for the development of composition studies and its efforts to "authorize" student writing:

Divorced from a pedagogy, from assignments, from specific teacher-heroes, the student writing that appears in Young Scholars in Writing carries a different kind of authority than the student writing that has typically appeared in the pages of composition studies' primary journals. . . . The Young Scholars articles' separation from particular teachers and pedagogies functions in two important ways. First, this separation guards against the charge that the student writing has been appropriated by teachers wishing to demonstrate the outcomes of a particular pedagogy. Second, such separation also allows teachers and scholars—myself included—to draw on the work of students without themselves falling right back into the narrative of teacher-hero (78-79).

I quote at length from this doctoral dissertation not only to illustrate how much influence Candace Spigelman's work has upon scholars of authorship and graduate students in authorship, but also because the passage from Prof. Robillard's dissertation illustrates how innovative and forward-thinking all of Spigelman's work is.

The Houston Grand Opera's recording of Mark Adamo's Little Women is on the stereo, as the most eloquent way I can find at this moment to express my personal grief. I have lost a treasured sister scholar.