David Morris

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, English, Faculty Member

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Dave Morris is Teaching Assistant Professor of English at the University of Illinois, where he teaches courses in literature, film, and rhetoric. He is author of Public Religions in the Future World: Post-Secularism and Utopia (University of Georgia Press 2021). He's working on a researched memoir about Type 1 Diabetes. He's tracking his progress on Substack (davehasdiabetes.substack.com) and Bluesky (davehasdiabetes.bsky.social).

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"The God of Small Comforts:" Self-care as Secular Queer Futurity in Becky Chambers's Monk and Robot Series

Modern Fiction Studies, 2025

This essay considers queer self-care as a sign of persistent yet skeptical commitment to the libe... more This essay considers queer self-care as a sign of persistent yet skeptical commitment to the liberatory potential of secularism in contemporary speculative fiction. Reading Becky Chambers Monk and Robot series (2021-2022) within secular queer futurity, this essay argues that self-care mediates the tension between ethical commitment to human worth and the necessity for productive labor in a liberated utopia. Self-care further challenges the production-oriented secular biopolitics of neoliberal austerity and revolutionary activism. By reading contemporary texts, this essay considers the self-conscious operation of postsecular and queer future critique in the twenty-first century. The City was beautiful, it really was. A towering architectural celebration of curves and polish and colored light, laced with the connective threads of elevated rail lines and smooth footpaths, flocked with leaves that spilled lushly from every balcony and center divider, each

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Course Design - BTW 250: Principles of Business Communication

by David Morris, A. Emmert, and Andrew Moss

Composition Studies, 2023

A t the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), as with many research-oriented institu... more A t the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), as with many research-oriented institutions, an increasingly popular option for writing courses includes a technical and professional communication (TPC) curriculum. Recent developments in TPC pedagogy have turned toward course designs and teaching practices oriented around social justice. At the same time, new developments in TPC administration recognize the role of non-tenuretrack (NTT) faculty in teaching TPC courses and staffing TPC programs. 1 The course we describe here, BTW 250: Principles of Business Communication, uniquely brings together these two branches of TPC research: we applied an ecological, social justice-based frame to our course and our course revision process, producing a course that serves contemporary students while stimulating a communal professional culture among formerly isolated instructors. BTW 250 is a multi-major professional writing course offered by the Department of English in service to students in other disciplines at UIUC. The course teaches students to apply the principles of successful professional communication to workplace writing. Because the course meets UIUC's general education requirement for advanced composition, students complete complex writing tasks in a multidisciplinary setting that requires analysis and synthesis, application of writing as a process through drafting and revision, and creation of 20-30 pages of original composition. As a service course and a general education advanced composition course, BTW 250 features instruction in specific business communication through the broader lens of writing pedagogy. The course's major assignments and scaffolded instruction are built around five student learning objectives (SLOs): 1. Compose effective business communication in written and/or multimodal forms. 2. Adapt content and delivery to specific professional conventions, audiences, and situations. 3. Take part in collaborative work to create effective professional communication. 4. Identify and make use of resources to make informed, responsible, goal-oriented writing decisions.

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Citing and Documenting Like a Researcher

I-Write, 2019

This is a chapter of the Illinois in-house first-year composition textbook, _I-Write_.

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Octavia Butler's (R)evolutionary Movement for the Twenty-First Century

In the ruined landscape of twenty-first-century California, Lauren Olamina, the main character of... more In the ruined landscape of twenty-first-century California, Lauren Olamina, the main character of Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, founds a new religion, Earthseed. Earthseed deifies the cosmic pervasiveness of change with a simple statement: "God is Change." While several scholars have usefully explicated the religious origins and affective qualities of the Earthseed community, I argue that Earthseed goes further, challenging the 1990s utopian imagination to invent new modes of organization that can work within new social and material realities. As a religion, Earthseed aims at changing humanity as a whole species, a goal so large that it requires radically new models of social and political organizing. In the second novel, Olamina changes Earthseed from a local, sustainable community to a decentralized movement that parasitically draws energy from social ruin. In doing so, Earthseed offers a challenge to the utopian thinking of the 1990s: fidelity to utopian goals requires new methods that can allow a utopian movement to thrive even in the absence of the robust public sphere that supported revolutionary social movements of the 1960s.

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Intellect and Activism: The Secular Authority of Left Behind

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