Elise Silva, PhD

Elise Silva is a recent Pitt graduate in English Composition with a subspecialty in Digital Studies and Methods. For the academic year 2023 – 2024 she is serving as a dually-appointed Postdoctoral Associate with Pitt Cyber’s Disinformation Lab and the Western PA Writing Project (housed in Pitt’s School of Education). 

Elise held various academic appointments before pursuing her PhD, including serving as an academic librarian and program director at Brigham Young University’s Harold B. Lee Library, and as a visiting faculty member in BYU’s English department.  

Elise’s current research interests revolve around digital information ecosystems and issues surrounding information creation, dissemination, and access. Her dissertation investigated critical information literacy and source-based writing: how people find, evaluate, and use source material in written contexts. She has published in the fields of rhetoric and composition, and information science. 

As a graduate student at Pitt, Elise received a Sawyer Seminar Information Ecosystems Fellowship and a Mellon Predoctoral Fellowship. Before coming to Pitt, she was awarded the American Library Association Library Instruction Round Table Innovation in Instruction Award for digital curriculum development.  

Her other recent projects include NSF-funded research on open source and open data ecosystems in collaboration with the Western PA Regional Data Center and The Sara Fine Institute. She served as the implementation lead on an open access online learning tool, the InfoEco Cookbook. Finally, alongside Khirsten Scott from Pitt’s School of Education, she co-facilitated a community engaged, Pitt grant-funded Wikipedia editing project through Pittsburgh-based HYPE Media.