
A Reflection
Last week, our chapter hosted an asynchronous event featuring blog posts from UWM alumni who graduated with a PhD in English and Communication. A common thread binding these posts was the disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic on multiple facets of their lives—from their scholarship, teaching, activism, and their personal lives. Reflecting on the blog posts, there emerge two prominent tensions these rhetorical scholars are experiencing: responsibility-capacity and fracture-recalibration. …
Jenni Moody
“Pandemic Algorithms of Moss and String” Artwork by Etsy user @AshleeCraft Image description: A drawing of a smiling yellow snail with a pink shell. Text reads: I must create my own chosen home so no matter where I go I will always belong. All of the communities I’d hoped for and believed in before the pandemic have…
Hilary Rasmussen
My name is Hilary Rasmussen, and I earned my PhD in Communication (specializing in Rhetoric) from UWM in 2017. After I finished the MA program at Northern Illinois University in 2010, I initially had no intention of returning for a PhD. I felt burned out on academics and was itching to get into my own classroom to teach. Despite the intense pressures of…
Storm Pilloff
Gravity I am so tired of reading pieces about everything that’s happened since March 2020 that begin “this last year has been so tough on everyone” or “we all know how unsettling this past year has been” glossing over multiple national and global traumas as if they were mere pop culture events. It’s become an…
Anne Basting
How Did I Get Here? I am rounding out my circular journey at UWM – I began in the English Department in 1995, when I came to the Center for (then) 20th Century Studies as a Rockefeller Fellow in Age Studies, and then a Brookdale Fellow from 1998 to 2000. I left academia for a few…
Kristin Ravel
So much has happened over the last two years, that it’s difficult to identify a clearly marked beginning. One possibility is to share that it had been a difficult decision to move on my own to Rockford, IL for a job as an assistant professor of English. After the death of a friend the year before,…
Introducing Our RSA Student Chapter: New Beginnings and Revitalized Community
The rhetoric students in the English and Communication departments at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee is excited to revise and develop our Rhetoric Society of America graduate student chapter. We held out first meeting in the spring of 2020 and elected Gitte Frandsen (English) and Kristin Wagel (Communication) as our co-chairs to lead us in our mission to…
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