Last Name	First Name	Area(s) of Research	RSA Proposals
Avant-Mier	Roberto	Roberto Avant-Mier, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor in the Communication Department at Boston College, in Boston, Massachusetts, and his research focuses on Latino/a identity-related discourse and discursive practices. Focusing on contemporary issues such as migration, immigration, diaspora, globalization, transnationalism, his interdisciplinary research often analyzes those through the lens of Latino/a rock music. His articles and book chapters have appeared in Communication research journals as well as Popular Music research journals, and he is currently working on a book manuscript that focuses on the intersection of rock music with the Latino/a diaspora.
Baca	Damián	Scholarly interests: I work at the intersection of rhetoric, subaltern studies, and globalization. Generally, I look to cultures in Latin America, the Caribbean, and U.S. Latinidad as a lens through which to complicate and inform two correlative domains of inquiry: 1) the disciplinary formation of the study of written language as it emerges during a crucial period of Western territorial annexation, and 2) the complicity between "racialized" identities and economy, from the development of the Trans-Atlantic commercial circuit in the sixteenth century to the present stages of global capitalism. Mexican-Amerindian intertextuality, a major theme in my recent publications, provokes the recognition of competing yet interwoven literacies. Thus, cumulative and comparative technologies of writing and rational thought in Mesoamerica/later America also guide my research and teaching.
Bokser	Julie
Castellanos	Jose	I am interested in theories and methodologies related to rhetoric that targets undocumented immigrants through conceptual tactics that tend to associate them with terrorists or with an invading culture. I am also interested in how these identities cause divisiveness within the Latino community between the undocumented and documented, and more generally, to contribute to the conceptualization of contemporary American culture. In my master’s thesis, I used theories from critical discourse analysis, cognitive semantics, and rhetoric, to identify such language in articles in USA Today. Currently I am pursuing PhD programs that have a focus in rhetorical theory, identity theory, and ethnography.
Cintrón	Ralph	Ralph Cintrón holds a joint appointment in English and the Latino and Latin American Studies Program. His research and teaching interests are in rhetorical studies; ethnography, particularly urban ethnography; urban theory; theories of globalization; political theory, particularly the anthropology of democracy; and social theory. He is on the Executive Board of the Rhetoric Society of America. Research wise, he is currently participating in a multi-disciplinary, ethnographic study of specific Puerto Rican and Mexican neighborhoods in Chicago. After completing fieldwork, the study will become a jointly authored book. Much of his fieldwork occurs in an alderman’s office, but the larger project focuses upon labor and housing issues, the transnational political and economic forces that underpin these communities, and the evolution of political ideology. He is also associated with UIC’s International Center for the Study of Human Responses to Social Catastrophe. In association with the Center, he has done fieldwork in Kosova and co-authored essays on humanitarian interventionism and international state-building. In addition, he is associated with the International Rhetoric Culture Project, which brings anthropologists and rhetoricians together, at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany. He is scheduled to be a co-editor for a forthcoming volume on politics. He is also producing a single-authored book that theoretically and ethnographically critiques a few of the key topoi of democracy (transparency, equality, freedom, rights) in order to explore the ruses of liberalism. He is a former Rockefeller Foundation Fellow, and one of his books, Angels’ Town: Chero Ways, Gang Life, and Rhetorics of the Everyday, won honourable mention for the Victor Turner Prize for Ethnographic Writing from the American Anthropological Association. During the academic year 2007-2008 he was Fulbright scholar at the University of Prishtina, Kosova.
Córdova	Nathaniel I.
Cozza	Vanessa	Currently, I am pursuing my Ph.D. in Rhetoric and Writing at Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, OH. My research interests include composition and rhetoric studies, writing center pedagogy, basic writing, multiculturalism, ESL, code-switching, critical pedagogy, race theory, and popular culture. For my dissertation research, I am interested in tracing the history of Latino/a literacies or rhetorical practices from the 19th or 20th centuries, while making connections based on their experiences inside/outside the classroom then and today. There are several questions that I’d like to explore: How will Latino/a rhetorics contribute to our understanding of the field today? How will this particular history influence or change pedagogical approaches in the classroom? What will Latino/a literacy practices and education reveal about their literacy practices today, their place in higher education, and how educators should approach the teaching of writing to bilingual groups?
De los Santos	René Agustín	My research interests include national (Mexico) and transnational (Latin America) rhetorics. I have been especially interested in understanding Mexican national rhetorical life as it has developed from the Revolution of 1910 to the current moment. This work is interdisciplinary and often draws on social theory , political theory, and theories of globalization. I am also very involved with work aimed at establishing formal ties between scholars working in the area of Latin American rhetorics across the American hemisphere, as well as internationally. This work has led to working alongside colleagues in Latin America, most notably with Gerardo Ramírez Vidal from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM-Mexico City, Mexico).
Durá	Lucía	My scholarly interests include rhetoric for social change, intercultural communication, technical writing, risk communication. I especially like to be involved in the areas of health promotion, public health, child protection, and women’s studies. My most recent work includes a research trip to the Peruvian Amazon to document the impact of an intercultural radio educative project implemented by an NGO called Minga Perú. I was also in Uganda and Indonesia documenting the impact of two different Save the Children initiatives utilizing the Positive Deviance to effect social change. My main focus at the moment is my dissertation prospectus, which will focus on the rhetoric of Positive Deviance.
Enoch	Jess	My research interests are in Chicana rhetorical history and in histories of Chicano/a education. I am also interested in the ways Chicana histories are preserved and articulated in public memory and through the public sphere. I'm currently exploring memorial murals and children's books on figures such as Emma Tenayuca.
Esquivel	Debi Lyn	As a specialist in tutoring center administration, Debi Lyn Esquivel has served California State University, Fullerton as the Assistant Director of the University Learning Center for 10 years and as a     lecturer in English for 16 years.  In addition to her roles at the university, she acquired grant funding in 2007 and, in collaboration with Sheryl Fontaine and a non-profit organization, established a   sustainable study center for disadvantaged youth in an indigenous Mayan village in Guatemala.  Most recently she has been engaged in a long term ethnographic study of reading, writing, and   education in the same Guatemalan village.
Evia	Carlos
Fontaine	Sheryl	A specialist in composition research and pedagogy, I am currently a professor at California State University, Fullerton.  In addition to teaching  academic and creative writing, composition theory, literacy, and disciplinary studies, I have administered different peer tutoring centers on campus, worked with our department Teaching Associates, and, most recently, have stepped into the position of department chair.  My research parallels teaching interests.  I have written and published works on teaching and tutoring writing, ethical issues in the field,  and writing administration. The collaborative work in which Debi Lyn Esquivel and I have most recently been engaged--a long term ethnographic study of reading, writing, and education in an indigenous village in Western Guatemala--initially emerged not from professional activities, but from personal involvement with a non-profit organization.
Foster	Helen
Fredrickson	Elaine	Research interests include transnational and intercultural rhetoric, dual language acquisition, bilingualism, and minority student writing pedagogy.
Gries	Laurie
Hall	Anne-Marie	Director – Writing ProgramFaculty – Rhetoric, Composition, and the Teaching of English (RCTE) – in Department of English. My research interests are ethnography, comparative pedagogies, critical pedagogy and democratic methodologies, and curriculum development in K-16. In 2003-2004, I conducted a 7 month ethnographic research project on literacy development and teaching in two communities in Oaxaca, Mexico. I continue to work on transcultural experiences and comparative pedagogies. I direct a collaborative program [intercambio de maestros] with graduate students and teachers at The University of Arizona and teachers in Sonora, Mexico, working with the Secretaría de Educación y Cultura in Hermosillo, Sonora, Mexico.
Hall Kells	Michelle	Michelle Hall Kells is Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Writing in the English department at the University of New Mexico where she teaches graduate and undergraduate classes in 20th Century Civil Rights Rhetoric, Contemporary and Classical Rhetoric, Writing and Cultural Studies, and Language Diversity. Dr. Kells’ research interests include civil rights rhetorics, sociolinguistics, and composition/literacy studies. She has served as the Program Chair for the 2007 UNM Civil Rights Symposia, “40 years of Community Activism, 1967-2007: Civil Rights Reform Then and Now.” This symposium was a notable success and part of Kells’ vision for UNM and the discussion of civil rights and rhetoric in the Southwest and beyond. Dr. Kells also served as the Program Chair for the fall 2008 University of New Mexico Civil Rights Symposium: “Civic Literacy Across Communities: A Public Forum,” generating cross-cultural dialogue and engaging diverse voices to promote inclusion. Kells also developed a variation on the WAC model entitled Writing Across Communities. The WACommunities project, a visionary one, is designed to help University faculty, graduate teaching instructors, administrators, and staff understand the many contexts in which students need to read and write effectively, and to provide instruction to meet those needs. This program is unique in the diverse student population it serves, and in its focus on “educat[ing] students for global lives…in which the ability to communicate fluently across boundaries is essential.” Professor Kells is coeditor of Attending to the Margins: Writing, Researching, and Teaching on the Front Lines, and Latino/a Discourses: On Language, Identity, and Literacy Education. Kells is author of Hector P. Garcia: Everyday Rhetoric and Mexican American Civil Rights. Her current book project is Vicente Ximenes and LBJ’s “Great Society”: The Rhetoric of Mexican American Civil Rights Reform.
Leon	Kendall	The central idea motivating my research interest is that there is a Chicana rhetoric that needs to be built through the investigation of different moments of Chicana rhetorical practice and performance; second that Chicana rhetoric is an especially pertinent area of study as it is an intentional sign of both an ideologically mediated identity claim and embodied “real” referential knowledge; and finally, that this particular rhetoric aligns with the “post-positivist” realist perspective that opens rhetoric to a research approach that treats different types of data as connected to a material reality that is subject mediated, yet objectively defensible. My research asks the following questions: What is Chicana rhetoric? How does one build a Chicana rhetoric and methodology? And finally, what are the affordances of Chicana rhetoric for rhetoric and composition scholars? A larger overarching question that will be implicitly addressed throughout the dissertation is the following: what are the purposes of developing cultural rhetorics for both research and practice? My research therefore entails recursively building a Chicana rhetoric that reflects and refracts how Chicana as a rhetorical identity operates in the world. To do so, I am currently working on a two-phase research project. The purpose of Phase 1 will be to outline a Chicana rhetoric built from both moments and performances in Chicana theoretical, philosophical, and poetic writings, as well as historic moments of Chicana activists’ work. The texts I am most interested in are ones that can be considered “programmatic”: or writing that outlines a vision of Chicana identity or a response (activism linked to Chicana identity) to an identified problem. The specific archival collections I have already examined are the Comisión Femenil Mexicana Nacional, a Chicana feminist organization. I am interviewing participants that arise in that textual data. I am also interviewing scholars who identify as Chicana. In addition, I am analyzing texts written by Chicana identified authors, paying attention to not only what they are saying, but how they are saying it. After a sampling of such work, I will begin to code for patterns and shared techniques of rhetorical practice in order to develop a theory of Chicana rhetorical practice. Phase 2 will test that Chicana theory as a methodology via an empirical study of Chicana activism.
Lunsford	S.Scott
Mello Vieira	Katia
Meyers	Susan	My research platform applies a materialist lens to historical and economic conditions surrounding literate experiences across a range of cultural contexts. This work is based on an interpretation of the New Literacy Studies, a grouping of theories that critique functional accounts of literacy, advocating instead an attentiveness to local manifestations of literacy. While such critiques are valuable, I argue that dominant constructions of literacy are important to consider as cultural artifacts that have been reified in our educational policies and institutions. Examining the intersections of state-sponsored and local literacies, my work traces the impact of globalization on the lived experience of literate actors. This work has implications for education and language policy, as well as classroom teaching. For instance, in my article “So You Don’t Get Tricked: Counter-Narratives of Literacy in a Rural Mexican Community,” I argue that the state-sponsored language arts curriculum in Mexico does not adequately meet the needs of the nation’s rural communities; and in my article “Pura Vida: What My Life in Costa Rica Taught Me About Teaching English as a Second Language,” I offer specific techniques for resisting cultural generalizations in order to better serve ESL writers. In 2007-2008, I was awarded a Fulbright fellowship to support my doctoral research on literacy practices in a migrant-sending community in rural western Mexico. The project, “Del Otro Lado: Constructions of Literacy in Rural Mexico and the Effects of Transnational Migration” is an ethnographic study of migrant families’ literacies and corresponding values. Specifically, while I found that formal education is strongly valued among Mexican migrant groups, it is considered more a marker of prestige than a means to self-realization or economic improvement. More broadly, I demonstrate the ways in which minority groups react to dominant ideologies and create spaces for subversion and active resistance. This orientation combats deficit models of education that fault minority students for low performance, replacing it with an asset model that considers the value of community literacies. Because of the cross-cultural and collaborative nature of this work, I continue to foster partnerships with researchers and educators on both sides of the border. Currently, I am collaborating with Professor Katherine Richarson-Bruna of Iowa State University who studies education in a migrant-receiving community in Iowa, where many of my Mexican research participants resettle. I am also interested in pursuing future field research in Mexico City in order to examine the institutional production of language arts textbooks.
Myers	Whitney	Dr. Whitney Myers enjoys teaching a variety of courses within the writing specialization of the English major, including composition and rhetoric, writing in the social sciences, indigenous rhetorics, composition theory, women’s rhetoric, and the history of rhetoric.Her secondary teaching interests include contemporary American literature and American Indian literatures. Dr. Myers research interests include feminist historiography, composition theory, and American Indian boarding school writing classrooms. Her dissertation constructs an archive of Albuquerque Indian School writing materials and develops a methodological framework for feminist historiographers and scholars studying writing and pedagogy in American Indian boarding schools.
Miller	Carolyn R.
Oakley Torres	Shirley	My scholarly interests include Latin American social movements, the Madres de Plaza de Mayo, and the motherist rhetoric of Hebe de Bonafini. Currently, I am a PhD student at the University of Memphis working on my dissertation, which is a comparative rhetorical study of motherist protest rhetoric of Dagmar Wilson, founding president of Women Strike for Peace in the U.S. and Hebe de Bonafini, president of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo in Argentina. My experience in Argentina and Chile includes a grant-funded development of a study abroad program at Coastal Georgia College where I was Assistant Professor of Speech Communication and International Program Coordinator. I directed two 3-week programs for college students, teaching Intercultural Communication and International Perspectives courses. This summer 2008 I took my fifth trip to Argentina to further my Spanish study at the Universidad Nacional de Cuyo in Mendoza and conduct dissertation research in Buenos Aires with the Madres.
Olson	Christa	A doctoral candidate at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, I study visual culture, democratic rhetorics, and theories of the public with a specific focus on Latin America, particularly Ecuador. My dissertation examines the role of images of indigenous people in the constitution of a sense of Ecuadorian national identity from the early republican period through the present.
Palacios	Ignacio
Perales Escudero	Moises D.
Ramirez	Cristina D.	Claiming the Discursive Self: The Rhetoric of Mexican Women Journalists, 1876-1940 introduces women rhetors who participated in not only in creating a Mexican national identity, but constructed that identity to insure women's place in history and in their current and future politics. Framed as a rhetorical historiography, this study fills a space in rhetorical history that has recently turned its gaze toward Latin American rhetors/rhetorics. It closely examines the rhetorical strategies of women, such as Laureana Wright de Kleinhans (1846-1896), Hermila Galindo (1885-1954), Juana Belén Gutiérrez de Mendoza (1875-1942), and a group of women from 1900, las mujeres de Zitácuaro. They employed their discourse to traverse the borders of gender identification, impacting the ideas in culture, politics, religion, and feminist beliefs. This dissertation examines unrecognized writings by Wright de Kleinhans, such as a history of notable Mexican women titled, Mujeres Notables Mexicanas. Also considered are primary documents I located on three research trips to archives in Mexico. These documents from 1900 bridge the reform writings of Wright de Kleinhans to the revolutionary era writings of Gutiérrez de Mendoza and Galindo. The scope and sequence of this project provides an in depth understanding of late nineteenth and early twentieth century Mexican women rhetors/rhetoric, demonstrating that they were not static individuals in rhetorical history, but strategic rhetors, who projected their voices in an intellectual conversation on identity creation.
Riedner	Rachel
Rojas Blanco	Clara Eugenia
Romano	Susan	Susan Romano received her doctorate from the University of Texas at Austin. She is currently an Associate Professor at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, where she teaches composition and rhetoric: their histories, theories, and practices. Key words for her research interests are cultural rhetorics, agency studies, institutional histories, feminist historiography, indigenous rhetorics, and colonial Mexico. Professor Romano’s publications include "The Egalitarianism Narrative: Whose Story, Which Yardstick?" (1993 Ellen Nold Award); "On Becoming a Woman: Pedagogies of the Self" (1999); “Fanaticism, Civil Society, and the Arts of Representation in Sixteenth-Century Mexico” (2003); “Tlaltelolco: The Grammatical-Rhetorical Indios of Colonial Mexico" (2004 Richard Ohmann Award); and “The Historical Catalina Hernández: Inhabiting the Topoi of Feminist Historiography” (2007). Her current book project, Receiving and Producing Rhetoric’s Resources: The Rise and Fall of Colonial Mexico’s Teaching Cultures, examines the interrelationships of race and gender at post-conquest micro-cultures preoccupied with the study and uses of language.
Romney	Abraham	Abraham Romney holds an MA in English from the University of Oregon, focusing on composition pedagogy and on the history of rhetoric. Now a PhD student in Comparative Literature at UC-Irvine, he maintains an emphasis on rhetoric in his research.  His research focuses on the relationship between rhetoric philology in 19th and early 20th century Latin America.  He is interested in the transnational (and transatlantic) travel of belletristic rhetorics to Latin America and in the nationalist political and rhetorical implications of philological texts that focus on teaching grammar and usage as an art of speaking.
Ruiz	Iris
Slater	Jacqueline Denise
Sowards	Stacey K.	Stacey Sowards is an associate professor and research fellow in the department of communication and the Sam Donaldson Center for Communication at the University of Texas at El Paso. She studies rhetorical practices related to culture, race, gender, and the environment, in the border areas of Texas and Mexico, as well as Latin America and Indonesia. Her current projects focus on the rhetoric of Dolores Huerta, immigration protests, media representations of undocumented immigrants, Ugly Betty, and ecotourism programs in Costa Rica, Mexico, and Nicaragua.
Thatcher	Barry	Barry Thatcher is an associate professor of rhetoric and professional communication at New Mexico State University. He has worked and taught intercultural professional communication for more than 17 years, including four years in Ecuador and ten years on the U.S.-Mexico border. His research interests include intercultural professional communication, U.S.-Mexico border rhetoric, border health literacy, history of rhetoric in Latin America, second language writing, and empirical research methods for intercultural contexts. He routinely consults with major organizations that deploy new technologies to Mexico and Latin America, including the EPA, U.S. DOT, Department of Homeland Defense, and private industry. He also is an adjunct professor at several Mexican border universities where he teaches research methods and medical and scientific communication. He has published extensively on intercultural professional communication, in both English and Spanish.
UT, El Paso	Rhet. Program
Valdés	Denise	As Latino/as encounter assimilation (and in some cases, colonization), augmentation to cultural norms, identity construction, and discursive practices become unavoidable. To that end, my main research interest is centered on the ways in which Latino/a rhetorics aspire to maintain a sense of individuality within those spaces where we find ourselves culturally and linguistically exiled. Additionally, I am also interested in Latina feminism and Critical Race Theory. Within Latina feminism, my research is specifically geared towards gaining knowledge respective to the sociolinguistic mechanisms that are specific to Latina women, and also how those mechanisms become expanded within a larger multi-cultural framework. My research in Critical Race Theory is centered on examining (essentialist) theories and explore how language, (and various rhetorical practices), have enabled the shaping and maintaining of racial inequalities that remain firmly in place within American culture.
Villanueva	Victor	Victor Villanueva, a Brooklyn-born Puerto Rican high school dropout, entered community college after the military (1968-1975), earning his Ph.D. in English from the University of Washington (with an emphasis in Rhetoric and Composition Studies) ten years later. He is currently a professor of English and American Studies at Washington State University where has been the recipient of numerous awards, including the Edward R. Meyer Distinguished Professorship in Liberal Arts. He has worked as an Equal Opportunity Program Director, Writing Project Director, a Director of Composition, Department Chair, and Associate Dean. He chaired the Conference on College Composition and Communication in 1999-2000 and was the chair of its annual meeting in 1998. The Young Rhetoricians Conference declared him “Rhetorician of the Year” for 1999. As well, Dr. Villanueva is the winner the 1995 NCTE David H. Russell Award for Distinguished Research and Scholarship in English and the Conference on English Education’s Richard A. Meade Award for Distinguished Research in English Education. Both awards were for Bootstraps: From an American Academic of Color. He is the editor of NCTE’s Cross-Talk in Comp Theory: A Reader (currently in its second edition), and is the co-editor of Latino/a Discourses (2004), Language Diversity in the Classroom (2003), and Included in English Studies (2002). He has edited a special edition of College English and is co-editing another, has four other books in various stages of development, has published 45 articles, book chapters, or reviews, many of which have been anthologized, and he has delivered over 100 presentations, nearly 40 of which have been keynote addresses, including a distinguished visiting professorship address. His current projects concern the rhetorics of the indigenous of Mesoamerica and the Caribbean and what those ways with words can tell us about current latinos and latinas in college composition classrooms, and the connections among economics, racism, and language. He once wrote that he was a professor, a husband, a father, and a happy man. All that remains true.