Michelle Hall Kells
Associate Professor
Interim Director of Rhetoric & Writing
Interim Director of Graduate Studies

Office: Humanities 269
Hours: MWF 1300-1400
Phone: 277-2305
E-Mail: mkells@unm.edu

Michelle Hall Kells is Associate Professor in the Rhetoric and Writing program. She has ten years teaching experience in Rhetoric and Composition. Her areas of specialization (civil rights rhetorics, sociolinguistics, and composition/literacy studies) coalesce around problems related to ethnolinguistic stratification and intercultural communication. Kells is program chair for the UNM 2008 Civil Rights Symposium. She also served as program chair of the 2005-2006 Writing Across Communities Colloquia Series at UNM.

Kells launched Attending to the Margins: Writing, Researching, and Teaching on the Front Lines (Heinemann, 1999) with Valerie Balester. A second, Latino/a Discourses: On Language, Identity, and Literacy (Heinemann, 2004) co-edited with Valerie Balester and Victor Villanueva focuses on teaching writing to diverse student populations. Recent articles include "Linguistic Contact Zones: An Examination of Ethnolinguistic Identity and Language Attitudes" (Written Communication, January 2002) and "Writing Across Communities: Diversity, Deliberation, and the Discursive Possibilities of WAC" (Reflections, Spring 2007) She recently released a book focusing on the rhetoric of civic discourse, Héctor P. García: Everyday Rhetoric and Mexican American Civil Rights (Southern Illinois University Press, 2006).