Jennifer Andrus <jandrus@andrew.cmu.edu>
Ph.D., Rhetoric
Home Page

I work at the point where institutional discourses meet an individual in the world in order to understand the constraints on agency in actual situations. I investigate the effects that ideas about language have on the rhetorical potential of individuals. I work interdisciplinarily by importing concepts and methods into a rhetorical framework; working across disciplinary boundaries provides insight into the assumptions and naturalized values of academic disciplines. My dissertation project brings together concepts from rhetoric, legal studies and linguistic anthropology in an analysis of a legal rule˜the excited utterance exception to hearsay. The excited utterance admits hearsay statements that are made when the speaker is excited. The assumption is that utterances made after the reflective (rhetorical) faculties of the speaker have been stilled are inherently reliable and thus need not be cross-examined. This rule is explicitly metadiscursive, but its impact reaches beyond the utterance itself. When an utterance is evaluated using the discourse of excited utterance case law, the discursive agency of those purported to have spoken an excited utterance is made to seem essentially nonexistent.
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Nathan Atkinson <natkinso@andrew.cmu.edu>
Ph.D. student, Rhetoric

Nathan Atkinson is a Ph.D. student in Rhetoric.
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Dan Baumgardt <dbaumgar@andrew.cmu.edu>
Ph.D. student, Rhetoric

Dan Baumgardt is a Ph.D. student in Rhetoric.
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Julie Bowman <jdbowman@andrew.cmu.edu>
Ph.D. student, Literary and Cultural Studies

Julie Bowman is a Ph.D. student in Literary and Cultural Studies.
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Thora Brylowe <tbrylowe@andrew.cmu.edu>
Ph.D. candidate, Literary and Cultural Studies

My dissertation traces the process by which early Romantic-era visual arts
ordered themselves into a field. Painters and promoters of the English
School used metaphors of the sister arts to legitimize their trade as a
liberal art. I look at the relationships between the book and engraving
trades and the discursive as well as material practices that created a call
for history painting in Britain around the turn of the nineteenth century.
Especially relevant to my study are John Boydell, Sir William Hamilton,
William Blake and his circle, Sir Joshua Reynolds, and Josiah Wedgwood. Top ^

David Cerniglia <dcernigl@andrew.cmu.edu>
Ph.D. student,, Literary and Cultural Studies

David Cerniglia is a Ph.D. student in Literary and Cultural Studies.
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Douglas Cloud <dcloud@andrew.cmu.edu>
Ph.D. student, Rhetoric

Douglas Cloud is a Ph.D. student in rhetoric.
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Nilak Datta <ndatta@andrew.cmu.edu>
Ph.D. student, Literary and Cultural Studies

Nilak Datta is a Ph.D. student in Literary and Cultural Studies.
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J. Timothy Dawson <jtdawson@andrew.cmu.edu>
Ph.D. student, Rhetoric

I am an actor with a masters in writing. I am interested in performance and performativity as each relates to literacy and composition pedagogy. Through my work developing and researching arts-in-education programming and arts-based curricula, I am advancing my interests in both a rhetoric of live performance and an investigation of the artistic process as a way of coming to knowledge. Influenced by the notion of "powerful literacy", I incorporate into composition pedagogy strategies normally reserved for performance pedagogy : I seek to involve writers in a physical relationship with their thoughts and words. In addition, I help run the Unseam'd Shakespeare Co. (www.unseamd.org). Now its 11th season, Unseam'd Shakespeare attacks works from the classical canon with a visceral wit and no respect whatsoever.
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Daniel Dickson-LaPrade <ddickson@andrew.cmu.edu>
Ph.D. student, Rhetoric

Daniel Dickson-LaPrade is a Ph.D. student in rhetoric.
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Darlene Everhart <dme@andrew.cmu.edu>
Ph.D. candidate, Literary and Cultural Studies

Darlene Everhart is a Ph.D. candidate in Literary and Cultural Studies.
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Hilary Franklin <hilaryf@andrew.cmu.edu>
Ph.D. student, Rhetoric

Hilary Franklin is a Ph.D. student in Rhetoric.
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Geoffrey Glover <gglover@andrew.cmu.edu>
Ph.D. candidate, Literary and Cultural Studies

Geoffrey Glover is a Ph.D. candidate in Literary and Cultural Studies.
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David Haeselin <dhaeseli@andrew.cmu.edu>
Ph.D. student, Literary and Cultural Studies

David Haeselin is a Ph.D. student Literary and Cultural Studies.
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Eric Hanbury <ehanbury@andrew.cmu.edu>
Ph.D. student, Rhetoric

Eric Hanbury is a Ph.D. student in rhetoric.
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Jeffrey Hinkelman <jh51@andrew.cmu.edu>
Ph.D. student, Literary and Cultural Studies

Jeffrey Hinkelman is a Ph.D. student in Literary and Cultural Studies.
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Ashley Karlin <akarlin@andrew.cmu.edu>
Ph.D. student, Rhetoric

Ashley Karlin is a Ph.D. student in rhetoric.
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Emily Klein <ebklein@andrew.cmu.edu>
Ph.D. candidate, Literary and Cultural Studies
Home Page

My teaching and research are located at the disciplinary intersection of performance theory, feminist studies and cultural studies. In my dissertation, “Constructing the American Activist: Twentieth Century Political Performances and Discourses of Social Change” I argue that successful, well-known political activists in the Americas have used both traditional and emergent theatre forms to construct and quite literally, rehearse new models of activist subjectivities. My sources include scripts, production notes, and oral histories from emblematic moments in American theatre history, from the Federal Theater Project’s innovation of the Living Newspaper program in 1935, to El Teatro Campesino’s appropriation of the diasporic carpa tradition in the 1960s, to Eve Ensler’s V-day campus initiatives in the 1990s. My fourth chapter, “Feminist Anti-War Activism and The Structures of Trauma in the Plays of Eve Ensler and Kathryn Blume” will be published by the University of Michigan Press as part of Jenny Spencer’s forthcoming anthology, Patriotic Dissent: Theatrical Responses to the War on Terror. I am this year’s recipient of the 2009-2010 Schaffer Dissertation Fellowship and I also serve as the Vice President of Development and Outreach for the Women and Theatre Program of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education.
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Sheila Liming <sliming@andrew.cmu.edu>
Ph.D. student, Literary and Cultural Studies

Sheila Liming is a Ph.D. student in Literary and Cultural Studies.
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Kari Lundgren <klundgre@andrew.cmu.edu>
Ph.D. student, Rhetoric

I am interested in the relationship between contemporary American Catholicism and conservative politics. In particular, I am interested in the ways that conservative Catholic political narratives employ strategies of authoritativeness, expertise, and legitimation, and how such strategies affect persuasiveness. Examples of such political narratives include the discourse surrounding climate change, free market economics, and the politicization of abortion.

Daniel Markowicz <dmarkowi@andrew.cmu.edu>
Ph.D. student, Literary and Cultural Studies

Daniel Markowicz is a Ph.D. student in Literary and Cultural Studies.

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Rebecca May <rmaatta@andrew.cmu.edu>
Ph.D. candidate, Literary and Cultural Studies

I completed both my BA and MA degrees here at CMU with a brief two-term study at Oxford University during undergrad. Currently, I am ABD, having completed my exams in the British long nineteenth century, emphasis on the novel. My interests (both research and teaching) include gender, histories of sexuality and medicine as well as all things gothic. In addition to teaching freshmen comp here at CMU, I have taught Intro to Gender Studies, Looking Forward, Sliding Back?: Nineteenth Century Stories of Progress and Decay and The Man(-) Made Monster from Frankenstein to Dracula. I have also led a seminar on Shakespeare at Chatham’s Pittsburgh Teacher’s Institute. My dissertation Morbid Parts: Gender, Seduction and the Necro-Gaze considers eroticized representations of corpses in travel and execution narratives, novels, poems, medical textbooks and engravings from the mid-eighteenth through the nineteenth centuries. A compressed version of it is forthcoming from Palgrave in A History of Sexual Perversion 1650-1850, edited by Julie Peakman. Finally for the academic year 2007-2008 I am interim director of the LCS MA program.
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William Marcellino <wmarcell@andrew.cmu.edu>
Ph.D. student, Rhetoric

I am a PhD student in rhetoric, still in coursework. I am interested in the rhetoric of the military--in how the US military makes and makes use of language in ways different from general civilian discourse. I have a special interest in rhetoric of the military because I think there is much at stake in the field, and because of my personal history as a Marine. I also think this is a critical subject in the 21st century. The "4th Generation" of war moves warfare away from the ability to maneuver in space at a higher operational tempo, to the ability to communicate, engage and persuade sections of the global electorate. Because warfare may now hinge on political discourses more heavily than before, understanding how professional militaries create identity, communicate with target electorates and communicate with civilian governments through specialized discourses has a special significance and urgency.
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Thomas Mitchell <tmitchel@andrew.cmu.edu>
Ph.D. student, Rhetoric

Thomas Mitchell is a Ph.D. student in Rhetoric.
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Meghan O'Keefe <mmo@andrew.cmu.edu>
Ph.D. student, Rhetoric

Meghan O'Keefe is a Ph.D. student in Rhetoric.
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Ronald Placone <rplacone@andrew.cmu.edu>
Ph.D. student, Rhetoric
[home page]

Ronald Placone is a Ph.D. student in Rhetoric.
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Robin Reames Henry <rreames@andrew.cmu.edu>
Ph.D. student, Rhetoric

Robin Reames Henry is a Ph.D. student in Rhetoric.
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Kurt Sampsel <ksampsel@andrew.cmu.edu>
Ph.D. student, Literary and Cultural Studies

I am new to Carnegie Mellon, an alumnus of Kent State University (B.A., 2004) and Ohio University (M.A., 2007). My scholarly interests are informed by my commitment to both literature and cultural studies/critical theory, and I tend to focus my reading, research, and teaching on traditional and non-traditional texts of the twentieth century, paying particular attention to the ways in which pop cultural trends inform and are inflected by texts of various kinds. I’m especially interested in the notion of body-as-text and in exploring the cultural and textual politics of body modification (e.g., tattoos and body piercing). I also like talking and thinking about issues related to teaching cultural studies as well as teaching students from working-class or first-generation backgrounds.
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Laura Schmidt <laurasch@andrew.cmu.edu>
Ph.D. Student, Rhetoric

Laura Schmidt is a Ph.D. student in Rhetoric.
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David Schuldt <dschuldt@andrew.cmu.edu>
Ph.D. student, Literary and Cultural Studies

David Schuldt is a Ph.D. student in Literary and Cultural Studies.
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Salita Seibert <sseibert@andrew.cmu.edu>
Ph.D. student, Literary and Cultural Studies

Salita Seibert is a Ph.D. student in Literary and Cultural Studies.
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Leslie Setlock <lsetlock@andrew.cmu.edu>
Ph.D. student, Rhetoric

Leslie Setlock is a Ph.D. student in Rhetoric.
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Ann Sinsheimer <asinshei@andrew.cmu.edu>
Ph.D. student, Rhetoric

Ann Sinsheimer is a Ph.D. student in Rhetoric.
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Emily Stark <vestark@andrew.cmu.edu>
Ph.D. student, Rhetoric

Emily Stark is a Ph.D. student in Rhetoric.
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Heather Steffen<hsteffen@andrew.cmu.edu>
Ph.D. student, Literary and Cultural Studies

I have a BA in English from Bowling Green State University and an MA in LCS from Carnegie Mellon. My research interests include late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American literature and culture, animal studies, cultural and critical theory, and the history of the university. My dissertation is a cultural history of the reorganization of human-animal relationships that took place in the last decades of the nineteenth century in the US. I am also managing editor of the minnesota review and assessment team coordinator for English placement at CMU.
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Christopher Taylor <cjt@andrew.cmu.edu>
Ph.D. student, Literary and Cultural Studies

Christopher Taylor is a Ph.D. student, in Rhetoric.
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Alexis Teagarden <ateagard@andrew.cmu.edu>
Ph.D. student, Rhetoric

Alexis Teagarden is a Ph.D. student in Rhetoric.
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Mark Thompson <mathomps@andrew.cmu.edu>
Ph.D. student, Rhetoric

Mark Thompson is a Ph.D. student in Rhetoric.
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William Thomas <bt16@andrew.cmu.edu>
Ph.D. student, Rhetoric

William Thomas is a Ph.D. student in Rhetoric.
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Angela Todd <at3i@andrew.cmu.edu>
Ph.D. candidate, Literary and Cultural Studies

Angela Todd is a Ph.D. candidate focusing on eighteenth-century literature and culture and Birmingham School cultural studies. She has previously published and presented papers on teaching the eighteenth century, ethnographic methodologies, and the eighteenth-century beauty patch. Currently she is an archival assistant at the Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation.
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David Van Every <dv2a@andrew.cmu.edu>
Ph.D. candidate, Rhetoric

David Van Every is a Ph.D. candidate in Rhetoric.
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Eric Vazquez <evazquez@andrew.cmu.edu>
Ph.D. student, Literary and Cultural Studies

I am principally interested in how the processes of globalization register in the United States. A common misunderstanding about these processes is that they radiate from the center (the U.S.) and move outward. I want to explore how American culture tries to make globalization “knowable” to itself in the contemporary moment. How does this seemingly unseen development become represented as a reality? To that end I want to explore the questions of the “real” in things like documentary, fictional and pornographic modes of representation. Other things that interest me include: theories of desire, theorizing the social substrate, the relationship of technology to culture, and materialisms.
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Necia Werner <nkw@andrew.cmu.edu>
Ph.D. student, Rhetoric
(412) 268-7509
[home page]

I came to the rhetoric program from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where I worked in the psychology department as a research assistant and as an editorial assistant for Memory & Cognition. It was there that I became interested in science as a persuasive enterprise, and in the rhetorical dimensions of cognitive neuroscience and editorial peer review. My dissertation research explores the role of values and objectivity in shaping scientific peer review practices during moments of controversy and change. I also teach courses in professional and technical writing, and will begin serving as Assistant Director of our undergraduate and masters programs in professional and technical writing in Fall 2006.
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Jessica Wilton <jwilton@andrew.cmu.edu>
Ph.D. student, Literary and Cultural Studies

Jessica Wilton is a Ph.D. student in Literary and Cultural Studies.
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Joel John Woller <jw5m@andrew.cmu.edu>
Ph.D. candidate, Literary and Cultural Studies

Joel Woller studies American literature and culture, with a focus on the emergence and consolidation of Fordism in the US (roughly 1910-1950). His areas of interest include cinema, proletarian fiction, and popular memory.
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Matthew Zebrowski <mgz@andrew.cmu.edu>
Ph.D. student, Rhetoric

Matthew Zebrowski is a Ph.D. student in Rhetoric.
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