2024: Isabelle Lundin for a study of walk-in tutoring
2023: Philip Montgomery, “Writing Center Language Policy: Negotiating Language Ideologies through Tutor Training and Consulting Practices”
2022: Olalekan Tunde Adepoju, “Difference in/at the Center: A Transnational Approach for Mobilizing International Graduate Writers’ Assets during Writing Instruction”
2021: Marina Ellis, “Tutors’ and Spanish-Speaking Students’ Dispositions Toward Literacy and the Effect of Their Dispositions on Tutoring Sessions”
2020: Dan Zhang, “Expanding the Discourse: Embodied Communication in Writing Tutorials”
Cristina Savarese, “Writing Center Use Among Community College Students”
2019: Anna Cairney, St John’s University, “The Writing Center Agency: An Editorial Paradigm in Support of Advanced Writers”
Joe Franklin, “Transnational Writing Studies: Understanding Institutions and Institutional Work Through Narratives of Navigation”
Yvonne Lee, “Writing Toward Expert: The Writing Center’s Role in the Development of Graduate Writers”
2018: Mike Haen, University of Wisconsin-Madison, “Tutors’ Practices, Motives, and Identities in Action: Responding to Writers’ Negative Experiences, Feelings, and Attitudes in Tutorial Talk”
Talisha Haltiwanger Morrison, Purdue University, “Black Lives, White Spaces: Toward Understanding the Experiences of Black Tutors at Predominantly White Institutions”
Bruce Kovanen,”Interactive Organization of Embodied Action in Writing Center Tutorials”
Beth Towle, Purdue University, “Critiquing Collaboration: Understanding Institutional Writing Cultures through an Empirical Study of Writing Center-Writing Program Relationships at Small Liberal Arts Colleges”
2016: Nancy Alvarez, “Tutoring While Latina: Making Space for Nuestras Voces in the Writing Center”
2015: Rebecca Hallman for her research on writing center partnerships with disciplines across campus.
2014: Matthew Moberly for his “large-scale survey of writing center directors [that will] give the field a sense of how directors across the country are answering the call to assess”
2008*: Beth Godbee, “Tutors as Researchers, Research as Action” (presented at IWCA/NCPTW in Las Vegas, w/Christine Cozzens, Tanya Cochran, and Lessa Spitzer)
*The Ben Rafoth Graduate Research Grant was introduced in 2008 as a travel grant. It was not awarded again until 2014, when the IWCA officially replaced the “Graduate Research Grant” with the “Ben Rafoth Graduate Research Grant. At that time, the award amount was increased to $750 and the grant was expanded to cover expenses beyond travel.