McCauley Honored with Charles Moran Award for Digital Writing and Instruction Research
Dr. Heidi McCauley, professor of rhetoric and writing at UA Little Rock, has been named the 2025 recipient of the Charles Moran Award for Distinguished Contributions to the Field of Computers and Composition.
Presented during the annual Computers and Writing Conference held May 15 in Athens, Georgia, the award honors exemplary scholarship and service in the evolving field of computers and writing. It was established in 2003 to celebrate the legacy of Charles Moran, a pioneer in digital writing studies.
“I was shocked and honored to receive the award,” said McCauley, a resident of Conway. “I was nominated by my colleagues, and I still feel too young to have ‘distinguished’ next to my name, but I’m incredibly grateful.”
McCauley has been a faculty member at UA Little Rock for 12 years, where she also serves as graduate coordinator for the Master of Arts in Professional and Technical Writing degree and the graduate certificates in Online Writing Instruction and Business and Professional Writing.
A respected voice in the field, McCauley has published widely on topics related to digital and online writing instruction, with recent work focusing on the intersection of writing and emerging technologies such as AI. Her current research includes a forthcoming article for the academic journal Computers and Composition tracing the history of online writing instruction and its recurring cycles of technological disruption. These include the rise of the internet to the COVID-19 pandemic to today’s rapid integration of generative AI tools.
“We tend to respond to each new technology with a sense of panic,” McCauley said. “That idea goes all the way back to Plato. He thought that writing words down on a stone tablet would ruin people’s memories. It’s been 2,500 years since then, and we still fear new technology.”
McCauley is the lead editor of the “Bedford Bibliography of Research in Online Writing Instruction,” which has served as a foundational resource for scholars in the field. She has also co-authored two recent books with Routledge: “Norman Maclean’s ‘A River Runs Through It’: The Search for Beauty” and “Multimedia in the College Classroom: Improve Learning and Connect with Students in Online and Hybrid Classes.”
Her scholarship has appeared in Computers and Composition, Composition Studies, Communication Design Quarterly, Technical Communication Quarterly, and Research in Online Literacy Education, among others. Through both her research and her teaching, McCauley has shaped national conversations about how writing is taught and practiced in an increasingly digital world.