Hannah Franz

Dr. Hannah Franz (she/her) is the Program Associate for Graduate Advisement at the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation, a scholarship foundation dedicated to advancing the education of exceptionally promising students who have financial need. In this role, Hannah supports the Cooke Graduate Scholars. She also develops resources to support Cooke College and Undergraduate Transfer Scholars in preparing for graduate school and fellowship opportunities.

Hannah’s work with the BAD Lab focuses on Black students’ linguistic agency in college writing. She has collaborated with BAD Lab scholars Prof. Anne Charity Hudley, Dr. Michelle Grue, Angela Rowell, Marie Tano, and Sierra Johnson to create the Students’ Right to their Own Writing (SRTOW) website for Black college students and their college writing instructors. This work was sponsored by a Research Initiative Grant from the Conference on College Composition and Communication. We write about our research process in the Summer 2022 issue of American Speech. Hannah is currently working on a book (to be published by Teachers College Press) based on the SRTOW website and her dissertation research. The book will detail a sociolinguistic approach to grading college writing. In addition to the SRTOW collaborators, BAD Lab scholar Ashleigh Plummer will contribute to the book project based on her research on grading college writing.

Hannah has a Ph.D. in Educational Policy, Planning, and Leadership from the College of William & Mary. As part of her doctoral work, she was a graduate assistant for Prof. Charity Hudley and the William and Mary Scholars Undergraduate Research Experience (WMSURE). The WMSURE curriculum resulted in a book that Hannah co-authored with Prof. Charity Hudley and Prof. Cheryl Dickter, The Indispensable Guide to Undergraduate Research: Success in and Beyond College, which prepares students to thrive in college so that they may continue to top graduate and professional schools. Other publications based on Hannah’s work with undergraduate research include an article in the journal Pedagogy co-authored with Prof. Charity Hudley and other scholars, including BAD Lab scholars Kendra Calhoun, deandre miles-hercules, Jamaal Muwwakkil, and Jeremy Edwards.

In addition to a Ph.D., Hannah has an M.S.Ed. in Reading/Writing/Literacy from the University of Pennsylvania, an M.A. in Linguistics from North Carolina State University, and a B.A. in Linguistics from William & Mary. She has previously designed and led a peer education program in Virginia Commonwealth University’s University College and taught middle school reading in Norfolk Public Schools in Virginia.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hannah-franz-a34a7ba1/