 Undergraduate
Masters
 PhD
 LCS
 Rhetoric
Courses
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The Doctor of Philosophy in Rhetoric at Carnegie
Mellon University is one of the oldest Ph.D. programs in rhetoric
in the United States and one of the most prestigious. The program
focuses on how people produce and understand discourse across a
variety of social, cultural, and material contexts, in schools,
workplaces, and communities. The program familiarizes students with
the history and theory of rhetoric and language study and with a
variety of methods, qualitative and quantitative, for systematically
exploring their interests in research projects and dissertation
work. The program prepares students for academic careers centered
on the history and theory of rhetoric, research about the writing
process and communication design more generally, or rhetorical approaches
to discourse and cultural studies. Among our areas of inquiry are
these:
- How do rhetors shape the resources provided
by history, culture, and the nature of the human mind and of human
language, for the purposes of inquiry and change?
- How do cultural and disciplinary assumptions
about language and language users influence the choices people
have available for how to act, how to talk, how to be, and how
to influence others?
- How are people's perceptions and discourse
strategies shaped by literacy, broadly conceived, and by technologies
for writing and other modes of communication design? How do people
use literacy to construct meaning for personal and public purposes?
- How has the study of rhetoric and writing
instruction functioned historically in the academy and how does
it function now?
- How can scholars and students use resources
from rhetoric to reach out into the non-academic world, to learn
to learn from others and facilitate communication across cultural
boundaries?
- What methods do discourse scholars have for studying
processes of communication in academic and other professional
settings, and for proposing and implementing effective and ethical
ways of improving such processes?
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Necia Werner, a Ph.D. student in Rhetoric, is the 2007 winner of the College
of H&SS Graduate Student Teaching Award.
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