Rebecca Black

Associate Professor of Informatics, University of California, Irvine
University of California, Irvine

Rebecca W. Black received her Ph.D. in Curriculum and Instruction from the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 2006. Her research centers on the literacy and socialization practices of young people from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds who are writing and participating in online, popular culture-inspired environments. This work includes an explicit focus on the 21st century skills and forms of literacy and learning that youth are engaging with in online spaces. Dr. Black’s work has been published in Teachers College Record, Reading Research Quarterly, Research in the Teaching of English, the Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, the International Journal of Learning and Media, and E-learning. Her book exploring how English language learning youth represent their cultural and linguistic identities through fan fiction texts was published by Peter Lang in the Spring of 2008.

From this contributor

Explore more from The Transmitter

Research image of perineuronal nets.

Organoids missing the TSC2 gene form rogue astrocytes; and more

Here is a roundup of autism-related news and research spotted around the web for the week of 28 September.

By Jill Adams
29 September 2026 | 2 min read
Research diagram of task-aligned activity rasters.

Cerebellar neurons reorient brain activity to differentiate similar behaviors

The findings provide a new perspective on how granule cells help to generalize learning across tasks.

By Holly Barker
29 September 2026 | 4 min read
Illustration of waterfall inside a woman's brain.

Revisiting the neural correlates of consciousness

Life happens in real time, but experience may be composed in ragtime—like the music genre, full of offbeat notes and uneven rhythms. The assumption that waking life consists of a “stream” of conscious representations has inadvertently led consciousness science to its current impasse.

By Francis T. Fallon, Michael Pitts
28 September 2026 | 7 min read