Karma R. Chávez, executive board Member
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My scholarship is primarily informed by queer of color theory and women of color feminism. Methodologically, I am a rhetorical critic who utilizes textual and field-based methods. In 2013, I published my first book, Queer Migration Politics: Activist Rhetoric and Coalitional Possibilities, which examines coalition building at the many intersections of queer and immigration politics in the contemporary United States. In 2019, I published a book of interviews I conducted related to Palestine while hosting a radio show on WORT-FM in Madison, Wisconsin. That book is called Palestine on the Air. I have co-edited two volumes, Text + Field: Innovations in Rhetorical Method and Standing in the Intersection: Feminist Voices, Feminist Practices in Communication Studies. Two co-edited volumes are forthcoming: Queer and Trans Migrations: Dynamics of Illegalization, Detention, and Deportation (with Eithne Luibhéid, U of Illinois Press) and Keywords for Gender and Sexuality Studies (with Kyla Tompkins, Aren Aizura, Aimee Bahng, Mishuana Goeman, Shona Jackson, and Amber Musser, NYU Press).
I am completing a manuscript called Alienizing Nation: HIV/AIDS and the Rhetoric of Quarantine, Ban, and Resistance, which is a rhetorical history of the AIDS pandemic in the United States that centers citizenship and immigration status to tell a story about AIDS during the early years of HIV/AIDS (1981-1995). With M. Adams, I am working on a collection of essays about our community-university collaborations in Madison, Wisconsin called, After Ferguson: Black, Queer, Feminist Experiments Against Police and Jails. |
andre E. johnson, EXECUTIVE BOARD Member
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Andre E. Johnson, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Media Studies in the Department of Communication and Film at the University of Memphis. He teaches classes in African American Public Address, Rhetoric Race and Religion, Media Studies, Interracial Communication, Rhetoric, and Popular Culture, and Hip Hop Studies. He is currently collecting and editing the works of AME Church Bishop Henry McNeal Turner under the title The Literary Archive of Henry McNeal Turner (Edwin Mellen Press). He has already published the first six volumes, and the seventh one is set for publication in 2020. Additionally, along with his academic titles, he currently serves as Senior Pastor of Gifts of Life Ministries an inner-city church built upon the servant leadership philosophy in Memphis, Tennessee.
In addition to collecting the writings of Bishop Turner, Dr. Johnson is the co-author (with Amanda Nell Edgar) of The Struggle Over Black Lives Matter and All Lives Matter. He is also the author of The Forgotten Prophet: Bishop Henry McNeal Turner and the African American Prophetic Tradition (2012) that won the National Communication Association (NCA) 2013 African American Communication and Culture Division Outstanding Book Award. He is the editor of Urban God Talk: Constructing a Hip Hop Spirituality (2013) and he is also finishing No Future in this Country: The Prophetic Pessimism of Bishop Henry McNeal Turner which the University Press of Mississippi plans to release in 2020. He also serves as the founder and managing editor of the popular Rhetoric Race and Religion blog hosted on the Patheos family of blogs. He is also the curator and director of the Henry McNeal Turner Project (#HMTProject); a digital archive dedicated to the writings and study of Bishop Turner. Dr. Johnson has published essays in the journal Religions, Howard Journal of Communications, Southern Communication Journal, Black Theology Journal, The New York Times, Journal of Contemporary Rhetoric and the Journal of Religion and Communication. |
vani kannan, EXECUTIVE BOARD meMber
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Vani Kannan researches writing across contexts (academic disciplines, workplaces, communities), multimodal/multigenre composition, and transnational/women-of-color feminisms. She is on the steering committee for the Women’s and Gender Studies program, co-coordinates Writing Across the Curriculum, and teaches a range of courses that include Composition, Writing and Social Issues, Women in Literature (with a focus on women-of-color writers), Creative Nonfiction, and graduate-level courses in Rhetoric and Composition. Her work has appeared in Enculturation: A Journal of Rhetoric, Writing, and Culture, Studies on Asia, and the edited collection The Political Turn in the Trump Era: Writing, Democracy, Activism. Additionally, she has co-authored articles for Journal of Writing Assessment, Community Literacy Journal, Reflections: Public Rhetoric, Civic Writing, and Service Learning, Literacy in Composition Studies, and Journal of Academic Freedom.
She is currently developing a book project on the Third World Women's Alliance, a group that organized against racism, sexism, and imperialism in New York City and the Bay Area during the 1970s. |
jacqueline jones royster, EXECUTIVE BOARD member
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Dr. Royster, former Dean of Georgia Tech's Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts (2010 – 2019), is Professor of English in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication. A graduate of Spelman College in Atlanta, Royster earned an M.A. and D.A. in English from the University of Michigan. Her research centers on rhetorical studies, literacy studies, women’s studies, cultural studies, areas in which she has authored and co-authored numerous articles and book chapters.
She is the author or co-author of four books: Southern Horrors and Other Writings: The Anti-Lynching Campaign of Ida B. Wells-Barnett (1997), Traces of a Stream: Literacy and Social Change among African American Women (2000), Profiles of Ohio Women, 1803-2003 (2003), and Feminist Rhetorical Studies: New Horizons in Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy Studies (2012). She is the co-editor of two books: Double-Stitch: Black Women Write about Mothers and Daughters (1991) and Calling Cards: Theory and Practice in the Study of Race, Gender, and Culture (2005), and the editor of an anthology for college writing courses, Critical Inquiries (2003). She was consulting writer for Writer’s Choice, a textbook series for grades 6 – 8, and co-editor of Reader’s Choice, a literature series for grades 9 – 12, both published by Glencoe/McGraw-Hill. Prior to joining Georgia Tech in 2010, Royster served as Senior Vice Provost and Executive Dean of the Colleges of Arts and Sciences at The Ohio State University (OSU). |
Khirsten L. scott, EXECUTIVE BOARD Member
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Khirsten L. Scott is an Assistant Professor of English with a speciality in Black rhetoric and public writing.
She actively contributed to the Routledge Reader of African American Rhetoric and has co-authored publications around the rhetoric of blackness in digital spaces and multimodality. Khirsten has taught a range of courses in writing and rhetoric focused on hip hop writing and African American rhetorical traditions. Her research lies at the intersections of cultural rhetorics, namely African American rhetoric, historiography, and digital humanities. Specifically, her work is centered on HBCU communities and the rhetorical affordances of institutional narratives for revisionist presentations of HBCU histories. Her current project challenges top-down presentations of HBCU narratives by exploring revisionist approaches to the institutional narrative genre through student newspaper publications. She is a co-founder of DBLAC, a digital network and learning community of Black graduate students in composition, literature, and literacy studies. |
anjali vats, EXECUTIVE BOARD member
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Anjali Vats teaches courses in the areas of race, rhetoric, law, and media studies. Her research is focused on rhetorics of race in law and popular culture. She has published articles in the Quarterly Journal of Speech and Communication, Culture & Critique. She is currently working on a monograph entitled Created Differences: Intellectual Property and the Formation of Race and National Identity in “Post-Racial” America, which considers how political, popular, and legal discourse about copyrights, trademark, and patents is used to create and manage racial and national identities in the United States and globally.
Anjali has been recognized for her work in the areas of race and gender. In 2013, she was awarded an AAUW Dissertation Fellowship from the American Association of University Women and an Exemplary Diversity Scholar Citation from the National Center for Institutional Diversity at the University of Michigan. She also previously received an Honorable Mention in the Ford Foundation Diversity Dissertation Fellowship. In addition, her research has been supported by a Society of Scholars Fellowship from Simpson Center for Humanities and the Institute for Ethnic Studies in the United States at the University of Washington. From 2008 - 2014, Anjali served on the board of directors of the Washington Debate Coalition, a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting debate in Washington. Prior to becoming a professor, Anjali clerked for the Honorable A. William Maupin of the Supreme Court of Nevada. She is licensed to practice law in Michigan and Washington. She is also an Assistant Professor in the Boston College School of Law. |
