Trey Bio:

Trey Conner earned his bachelor’s degree in English with honors at the University of Florida and completed both his Master’s degree and PhD in Rhetoric and Composition at Pennsylvania State University. His dissertation, "Remixing the Lost Book of Rhythm" engages technologies of communication, collaboration, and education, and pays special attention to the way writers today increasingly deploy digital and “musical” techniques such as sampling and mixing to share and transform information and ideas in ways that build communities and produce value. Taking p2p as a topos for the expanding classroom, this project narrates learning experiments initiated to test a simple premise: the interconnectivity of peer-to-peer networks of collaboration and exchange are fundamentally rhythmic and pedagogical practices. Trey has been married to Angie Childers-Conner for 14 years. Angie is currently finishing a dual B.S. and M.S. in Labor Studies and Industrial Relations/Human Resources at Penn State. Together, Trey and Angie care for their daughter, Odessa, age 10, and their son, Aeden, age 5.

Trey’s primary interests converge on questions about distributed and collective writing, and he has gained much of his own compositional experience in networks of musical collaboration. Group improvising, engineering, filesharing, rehearsing and performing in sound directly informs and grows his research. Trey’s "dispersed" musical project, Leels, grew out a “geophysically bound” Flordia-based projects, including Meringue and Weinix. Separated by many states (NY, PA, FL, MD, TX), Leels depends on the technologies of filesharing to rehearse and train their sensus communis; the goal of this compositional practice is to share, arrange, and order sound in a way that creates further opportunities to pursue common ideas as this ideation converges in song structures. While teaching and completing his Master’s degree and Doctorate at Penn State, Trey enjoyed working closely with Pennsylvania-based sound projects including Peacefeather and the Order of the Silver Cosmonauts, who recruit new participants in the midst of live mixing and overdub performances at ice skating pavilions, radio stations, record stores, libraries, art galleries, and the Center for Sustainability at Penn State. These musical projects meshed with Trey’s academic projects at the Leonhard Center Technical Writing Initiative, his capacities as tutor at the Writing Center at Penn State, as a fellow of the Science, Medicine, Technology and Culture Group, and as a consultant for the Lionshare peer-to-peer software development project at Penn State. Trey has shared his research at the Computers and Writing Conference, the Sweetland Writing Center, the Julian Woods Zendo, and the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts Conference, and has enjoyed National Science Foundation support while writing his dissertation. In the fall of 2006, Trey accepted a position as Assistant Professor of English at the University of South Florida , St. Petersburg, Florida.