The title of the keynote address was, “Literacy Crises, Then and Now: The Multimodal, Multilingual Past, Present, and Future of English Studies,” and indicates that Palmeri is still deeply engaged in the same types of intellectual pursuits as those explored in Remixing Composition.Palmeri was afforded an hour for his address, which he split roughly evenly between a lecture style presentation and a question and answer period. For the lecture portion of his address, he did something slightly outside the norm. Rather than resting on his laurels and presenting a rehash of or expanding upon his already published research – which, given his position in the field and the stated goal of the conference as a place to exhibit graduate-level research, would have been a reasonable and acceptable position for Palmeri to assume – Palmeri gave the audience a glimpse inside his research methods and what lay ahead for his future publications.

Palmeri’s current research projects are a compliment to his work in Remixing Composition, in so much as he is still investigating how previous attempts to infuse multimodal composition into traditional English composition classes. While Remixing Composition only investigated multimodal composition from approximately 1965 to 1987, his current research endeavors seek to uncover glimpses of multimodal composition in the early decades of the 20th century. In particular, Palmeri explained that he and a colleague had recently begun to think about the ways that emerging technologies in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s would have shaped composition instruction, which lead them to examine how the rise of radio and film as means of popular entertainment and communication were influencing composition instructors, both in terms of how the writing process was taught and the types of writing instructors were asking their students to produce.

The central theme of his work, both past and present, is that changes in technology have always presented composition instructors with challenges, and these challenges have led people to assume there is a crisis in academia, in which the written word is perceived to be falling out of use in favor of some newer concept of communication. By extension, composition instructors are increasingly put into positions of having to prove the merits of their work by adapting to these new technologies, or finding ways to make them applicable to the teaching of writing.

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