Past Writing and Rhetoric PhD Dissertations

Spring 2025

Danielle DeArment-Donohue

"Making a Way Out of No Way:” Rhetorical Navigation of Workplace Lactation

 

Jenny Goransson

Contemplative Feedback Practices for the Endless Stack: A Qualitative Study of Mindfulness Practices for Writing Teachers’ Response Work

 

George Guay

The Rhetoric of Ghost Bikes

 

Jeannette Mulherin

Cults and Confidence: An Examination of Cult Recruitment Rhetoric Targeting Women and Its Presence in Mainstream Confidence Culture Discourse

 

Jonathan Marine

A Theoretical Model of Writing Engagement in Higher Education

 

Tyler Martinez
Sustainable Dwelling: Attuning to Metonymies and Revealing Spaces of Rhetorical Invention

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Fall 2024

Karen Bishop

The Rhetorical Embodied Dialogue of Yoga

 

Tanya Boucicaut

Let's Chill And Protest: Reclaiming Leisure and Identity for HBCU Students During Greekfest 1989

 

Indigo Erikson

Disrupting Despair: Faculty Reflection, Institutional Intervention, and the Transformation of Writing Pedagogies in Community College Composition

 

Ron'ada Hewitt

A Theoretical Model of Writing Engagement in Higher Education

 

Shantay Robinson

Who Controls the Image? Observing the Visual Rhetoric of Black Women Today

 

Heather Smith

Activity Theory and the Designation of Vulnerable Populations as Tactical Technical Communicators: Female Veteran Farmers as Knowledge-makers in the Use of Agriculture Tools

 

Emily Staudt

Dynamic Reflective Practices for Graduate Teaching Assistants in Composition: Pathways to Professional Development.

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Summer 2024

Laurie Miller

Writing Faculty Perception and Application of Linguistic Justice Principles

 

Munira Mutmainna

An Inquiry of Health Narratives of South Asian Immigrant and International Communities in the U.S. 

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Spring 2024

Jackie Brown

Trust in Higher Education: Faculty Perspectives on the Facets of Trust in Business Writing-Intensive Classrooms

 

Jason Grant

Dialogic Rhetoric: How Publics Emerge, Meaning is Created, and Governments are Structured as Localized Solutions to Public Problems

 

Matt Green

Engines of Agency: Impact Events in the Development of Tabletop Roleplaying Games

 

Anna Habib

Linguistic Justice, Translingualism, and the Lived Experience of Language: “the Unraveling of What Once Felt Intact

 

Joan Hwang

Ethical Implications of Communicating Risk in the Media: A Heuristic for Reporting on Crisis Events with a Focus on Mass School Shootings

 

Chalet Jean-Baptiste 

Neoteric Intellectuals: How African American Navigate and Exercise Agency at Predominantely White Institutions

 

Kathryn Meeks

Rhetoric of the Natural World: Temporal Tensions in Rhetoric After-the-Fact, Intergenerational Rhetoric, and Public Display

 

Michelle Ruehl

Theater as a Rhetorical Social Intervention: Using Trauma Responsive Rhetoric with Military and Veteran Communities

 

Megan Rathburn (Voelkel)

Virtual Effects: A Qualitative Research Study on the Influence of Event Context on Genre Use and Genre Knowledge

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Fall 2023

Lauren Foster 

Metacognition as a Transformative Process in Teaching and Learning

 

Summer 2023

Christine Kervina

Toward a New Model for Disciplinary Literacy Instruction: Reuniting Reading and Writing as Co-equal Literacies with the WAC/WID Balanced Disciplinary Literacy Instruction Model


Caitlin Dungan

"There's No Way She's Straight": Towards a Heuristic of Positive Queer Representation in Gaming

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Spring 2023

Tom Polk

Accessing Authenticity: Theorizing a Holistic Model of Writing Development


Randa Saad

The Perceptions of Writers With Learning Disabilities: What Helps Them Write In College

 

Lauren Tuckley

Genre Performance and the Discursive Regulation of Value Alignment: How the Personal Statement Mediates Organizational Access and Ideologically Reproduces its Members

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Spring 2022

Jessica McCaughey

Dynamic Workplace Writing Transfer: Writing Across Career Change


Lacey Wooten 

Doing the Right Thing: Professionalism, Deep Accountability, and Emotional Labor in Disciplinary Writing Instruction


David Corwin

Friendship Shouldn’t Hurt: Toward a Trauma-Literate Rhetoric of Friendship Through Post-2010 Television


Roni Garrison-Joyner

Black at the OBGYN: Rhetorics of Race in Women’s Health Care


Kyle Trott

A Rhetorical Analysis of Teacher Instructional Speech

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Fall 2021

Norma Coto

Persuasion by Word of Foot: A Rhetorical-Ontological Inquiry into Barefoot Running as a Health Practice

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Summer 2021

Ashley Yuckenberg

Ethical Implications of Communicating Risk in the Media: A Heuristic for Reporting on Crisis Events with a Focus on Mass School Shootings

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Spring 2021

Sarah Johnson

From Standard English to Synergistic English Work: Uncovering Writing Instructors’ Negotiations of the Standard English Dilemma and Paradox in Their Writing Assessment Practices


Robyn Russo

Towards an Expansive Equity: Reimagining How Writing in Two-Year Colleges can Facilitate a New Vision of Equity as a Practice

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Spring 2020

Jennifer Messier

How Contingent Composition Faculty Members Reframe Professional Identity Through Faculty Learning Communities

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Summer 2020

Bree McGregor

Secret, Unofficial, And Military-Connected: How Active-Duty U.S. Marines Use Social Media To Cultivate Professionalized Learning Communities

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Summer 2019

Elizabeth Martelli (Ferguson)

Decolonizing Epidemics: Power Structures that Define, Name, and Frame Medical Disasters

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Spring 2019

Amber Jensen

Preservice English Teachers and 21st Century Composition in Flux: Implementing Principles of Writing Across Sites of Learning


Lourdes Fernandez 

Agency and Ontology in the Rhetorics of Sexual Assault


Kellie Gray

“It wasn’t supposed to be hairy”: From Variant Glyphs to Rendered Ecologies of Code, Constraint, and Culture


Rachael Lussos

Rhetorics of Quantification in the Context of Chronic Pain


Paul Michiels

Toward a Paraphrase Pedagogy for Multilingual Writers: Weighing Pedagogical Prescriptions Against Instructional and Disciplinary Practice


Beth Caravella

Teaching Gamefully: Proceduralizing the Classroom through Possibility Space Pedagogy

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Spring 2017

Colleen Reynolds

21st-century Rhetorical Practices for Business-to-Business Sales Professionals and Sales Educators that Synthesize Shakespeare and Improvisation with Theories of Kenneth Burke