Amber Foster

Amber Foster joined the Writing Program in 2015, after over a decade teaching in various disciplines, including English as a Second or Foreign Language (ESL/EFL), technical and professional writing, creative writing, literature, and rhetoric and composition. She completed a Ph.D. in English with a creative writing emphasis from Texas A & M University after many years teaching overseas in countries such as France, Japan, and Honduras. Her publications include journalism, literary and pedagogical scholarship, and creative writing; her most recent work is a co-authored scholarly monograph (with Dr. Tamara Black), Humane Composition Pedagogy, forthcoming in 2025 via Palgrave Macmillan.

She is also an active and engaged member of the Trojan Community. She is a former co-chair of the Research, Teaching, Practitioner and Clinical Faculty Affairs Committee (RTPC-FAC) (now Faculty Affairs) and a current member of the Faculty Environment and Employment committee (FEEC). At the departmental level, she is a current member of the Writing Program’s Standing Hiring committee, and she has previously co-chaired faculty Merit Review and Teaching with Technology committees. She is also deeply invested in faculty mentorship; in addition to serving as a formal mentor to various junior faculty and participating in faculty evaluation committees, she has served as an instructor for Summer Professional Development (faculty onboarding and training), as well as WRIT 501: Theory and Practice in Teaching Expository Writing. In Fall 2024, she was awarded a research sabbatical through Dornsife’s Advancing Scholarship in the Humanities and Social Sciences (ASHSS) program for her ongoing work on Humane Composition Pedagogy.   

• Ph.D. English, Texas A&M University, 8/2015
• MA UC – San Diego, 6/2002
• BA UC – Davis, 6/2000