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Deborah Brandt (born 1951), professor emerita at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is regarded worldwide as one of the most influential literacy scholars.

She earned her B.A. from Rutgers in 1974 and her Ph.D. from Indiana in 1983, after which she accepted a position at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a position she held until she retired in 2010. Although she has published more than two dozen articles and book chapters, she is perhaps best known for Literacy in American Lives(Cambridge UP, 2001), for which she won three awards: the Modern Language Association’s Mina P. Shaughnessy Prize (2002), the Grawemeyer Award (2003), the Conference on College Composition and Communication’s Outstanding Book Award (2003). Her text Literacy as Involvement: The Acts of Writers, Readers, and Texts (Southern Illinois UP, 1990) won the 1992 David H. Russell Award for Distinguished Research from the National Council of Teachers of English.

Brandt has dedicated much of her research, teaching, and service to addressing gaps in access to literacy. In Literacy in American Lives Brandt "explains how generations of Americans have made sense of and coped with increased pressure to improve their ability to read and write." In this text, she puts forward the notion of "sponsors of literacy," one that has ricocheted through the field of writing studies, transforming how many understand the process by which Americans come to be literate. She writes, "Sponsors, as I have come to think of them, are any agents, local or distant, concrete or abstract, who enable, support, teach, or model, as well as recruit, regulate, suppress, or withhold literacy -- and gain advantage by it in some way." Through the concept of sponsors, Brandt argues for attention to the socioeconomic and contextual forces that enable and disable access to literacy.