UCI Rhetoric
Graduate students.
Chimee Adioha
Chimee Adioha is an English PhD student, with a focus on composition theory & pedagogy, migration studies, translingualism and gender/sexuality studies. He has studied English/Education at Imo State University, Nigeria and Rhetoric & Writing Studies at the University of Texas at El Paso. His Masters research examined how First Year Writing students understood social justice pedagogies and the possibility of using that understanding across contexts and outside classroom spaces. He is the Founding Editor of the African literary blog Black Boy Review , & the Co-founder of Diaspora Africa .
Ronnese Kirton Glover
Ronnese Kirton Glover’ s research concerns the long-lasting consequences of chattel slavery literacy laws and the ways in which they materialize in contemporary composition pedagogy. More specifically, her work draws critical attention to how academic language norms disadvantage Blacks students and Black vernacular knowledge, contributing to anti-Blackness in the classroom. This work employs composition theory and pedagogy, critical race theory, Black studies, literature and culture, and critical university studies. Engaging theories of racial passing, decolonization, and critical pedagogy, Ronnese’s work aims to project alternatives to anti-Blackness in educational spaces. She holds a BA and MA in Literature from California State University, Los Angeles.
Johansen Pico
Johansen Pico is a PhD student in the Department of Global and International Studies, exploring the formation of queer, anti-colonial subjectivities through the politics of “life-making.” Their work expands on their MA research at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where they argued that the U.S.’s deployment of justificatory rhetorics played an integral role in advancing their colonial project in the Philippines at the turn of the 20th century. Johansen’s current work traces a genealogy of Philippine resistance and works toward bridging these histories with world-making projects embedded within Black radicalism and queer and trans of color critique. Their broader research agenda aims to highlight existing, local forms of revolutionary praxis which inform anti-colonial movements on a global scale.
Librecht Baker
librecht baker is cultivating a PhD in English with an emphasis in African-American/Black rhetoric, Black Feminist Theory, and egun reverence. baker obtained MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts from Goddard College and dual Bachelor’s in English and print journalism from California State University, Long Beach Some of baker’s writings appear in Q Youth Foundation’s 2021 Eastside Queer Stories Radio Plays, ACCOLADES: A Women Who Submit Anthology , Solace: Writing Refuge, & LGBTQ Women of Color , Sinister Wisdom 107 – Black Lesbians: We are the Revolution!, and other publications.
Sarah Goeppner
Sarah Goeppner received her MA in English from UC Irvine (2022) where she is currently a doctoral candidate in English literature. Her research interests include medieval sanctuaries and scenes of recognition and reunion in late medieval and early modern literature. Her work is informed by cognitive science and literary legacies of generational trauma. She is committed to the ongoing goals of community-oriented justice initiatives and interdisciplinary activism at UCI.
Munyao Kilolo
Munyao Kilolo is a writer and editor with a journalism background. His work as a Comp Lit Ph.D. student involves the comparison of African and European languages and their interactions, as well as translation theory and practice.
Leah Senatro
Leah Senatro is an English PhD candidate with an emphasis in the Medical Humanities. Her research explores the rhetorical consequences of the body and sensorial experience. She is currently a GSR in the Office of the Campus Writing and Communication Coordinator at UCI and is also the graduate student representative for the Rhetoric Research Cluster. She earned her bachelor’s degree in English and philosophy from Santa Clara University in 2019.
Lucy Zi Wei Fang
Lucy Zi Wei Fang is a PhD student in English. Her research, supported in part by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, examines literary forms of the US-China circuit as they register and reproduce material relations and the early Asian/American archive.
Rachel Hoffer
Rachel Hoffer is currently an English Ph.D candidate working on my dissertation in nineteenth century literature and tracing the rhetorical relationship between affect theory, aesthetics, pessimism, misanthropy, and suicide in Gothic and Victorian novels and culture.
Letizia Mariani
Letizia Mariani is a PhD candidate in English with an emphasis in Critical Theory. She studies the social life of poetry as a communicative register in spaces ranging from social justice movements to public bathrooms. Her work draws interdisciplinarily from poetry and poetics, linguistic anthropology, sociology of literature, and rhetorical studies. She holds an MA in English and American Literature from New York University.
Dalton Salvo
Dalton Salvo is pursuing a PhD in English Literature emphasizing in Critical Theory at UCI. His current research examines how virtual, augmented, and mixed reality technologies function rhetorically and phenomenologically to induce cooperation in users. The end goal of his theoretical research is to practically apply it in the creation of a literature course designed from the ground up for and held entirely in virtual reality. He earned his bachelor’s degree in English Literature from the University of San Diego, his MSc in British Literature from the Enlightenment through the Victorian period from the University of Edinburgh, and a second MA in Rhetoric and Writing Studies emphasizing in teaching composition from San Diego State University.
Allison Dziuba
Allison Dziuba is assistant professor of English in the Composition, Rhetoric, and English Studies (CRES) Program at the University of Alabama. She completed her PhD in English and the Graduate Feminist Emphasis at UCI. Her research examines how college students employ curricular and extracurricular resources to counter hegemonic discourses and to forge feelings of belonging. She is a recipient of the American Association of University Women (AAUW) American Dissertation Fellowship . Her work has appeared in Peitho: Journal of the Coalition of Feminist Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition , Rhetoric Review , and in an edited collection on literacy studies research. Like some of her illustrious RCGC colleagues, she previously served as the editorial assistant for College Composition and Communication and Rhetoric Society Quarterly and as the Campus Writing and Communication Fellow.
Jasmine Lee
Jasmine Lee is an assistant professor in the department of English at California State University, San Bernardino. She completed her PhD and the Critical Theory Emphasis at UCI in 2018. Jasmine’s dissertation traced the influence of capitalism through various sites of American rhetorical education in the twentieth century, exploring how the political economic order has underwritten foundational figures in our field, especially the figure of “youth.” Jasmine’s work has appeared in the Journal for the Fantastic in the Arts ; the Instructor’s Manual of Understanding Rhetoric, 2nd edition, the graphic textbook by Elizabeth Losh and Jonathan Alexander; and the Los Angeles Review of Books . During her time at UCI, Jasmine served as the Editorial Assistant for Rhetoric Society Quarterly; Editorial Assistant for College Composition and Communication; and Graduate Writing Fellow in the UCI Office of the Campus Writing Coordinator. You can find additional information about Jasmine, her teaching, and her research at jasminelee.me .
Abraham Romney
Abraham Romney is an assistant professor at Michigan Tech, where he also serves as the director of the Multiliteracies Center. He received his PhD in Comparative Literature at UC Irvine. His dissertation, Latin American Rhetoric: From Civilization to Modernity , examined historical and indigenous rhetorics, focusing on the role that rhetorical manuals and concepts from the classical rhetorical tradition played in shaping Latin American language policy and higher education and perceptions of indigenous populations. Visit his Academia.edu profile .
Loretta Ramirez
Loretta Ramirez is Assistant Professor of Latinx Rhetoric and Composition at California State University, Long Beach in the Chicano and Latino Studies Department. Her research explores historical and visual rhetorics, emphasizing Chicana writing, decolonial theory, and composition pedagogy. Loretta is recipient of a 2020 Scholars for the Dream Award, conferred by the Conference on College Composition & Communication. She is currently preparing for publication her monograph, The Stitch and the Wound: Chicana Rhetorics from Medieval Iberia to SoCal Art and Life.
Jens Lloyd joined the faculty in the English department at Drew University in 2018. He completed his PhD at UCI, where his dissertation focused on exploring how campuses function as dynamic social and material environments for rhetorical education and college writing. During his time at UCI, he served as Campus Writing Fellow and as Editorial Assistant for College Composition and Communication and Rhetoric Society Quarterly . You can read his scholarship in Literacy in Composition Studies , Present Tense: A Journal of Rhetoric in Society , and Reflections: A Journal of Community-Engaged Writing and Rhetoric , as well as in an edited collection from SUNY Press about teaching writing at Hispanic-serving institutions.
Libby Catchings
Libby Catchings completed her PhD in English at UCI in 2015. Using methodological frameworks drawing on rhetorical theory, anthropology, critical race theory, and law, her dissertation examined composition practices in prison-based literacy communities and the rhetorical economies that govern the scholarship promoting that work. Her research has been published in Written Communication, WLN: A Journal of Writing Center Scholarship, The Faulkner Journal, and Reflections: A Journal of Community-Engaged Writing and Rhetoric. Libby is Assistant Teaching Professor of Writing at the University of Denver, where she also serves as Affiliate Faculty and Advisory Board member for the DU Prison Arts Initiative, supporting incarcerated Colorado writers through multimodal composing workshops and a writing lab.
Maureen A. J. Fitzsimmons
Maureen A. J. Fitzsimmons received her Bachelor of Arts in English and also her Master of Arts in English, with an emphasis on Rhetoric and Composition, from Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, California. She completed her PhD in English at the University of California, Irvine, focusing on Rhetoric and Composition. She was a Fellow in the Lilly Fellows Program in the Humanities and the Arts, in addition to being a University of California at Irvine Regent’s Fellow, and served as Vice Chair of the Jesuit Conference on Rhetoric and Composition. Her scholarly interests included composition historiographies and pedagogies, in all their manifestations, with special attention to Jesuit pedagogy. She wrote a chapter in Traditions of Eloquence , edited by Cinthia Gannett and John Brereton, from Fordham Press, and published a book review on the Stephen J. Reid and Emma Annette Wilson edited Ramus, Pedagogy and the Liberal Arts in Rhetorica .
Rachel Stumpf
Rachel Stumpf completed her PhD in Education at UCI in 2018. She is currently the Faculty Development Program Manager at Santa Clara University. Rachel’s research is motivated by her experiences as a high school language arts teacher and a facilitator of teacher professional development. In her dissertation research, Rachel examined how students developed as writers as they transitioned from high school to college writing environments. Rachel also studies the role that classroom instruction, curriculum, and policy play in writing development.
Lance Langdon
Since completing his PhD in English with an emphasis in Composition in June 2014, Lance Langdon has served as Visiting Assistant Professor in UCI’s Humanities Core Program and Lecturer in UCI’s Composition Program. His dissertation Feeling Engaged: College Writers as Literacy Tutors , examined the emotional contours of the university-community partnerships he initiated within Mexicanx communities in Orange County. In addition to publishing a book review, a website, and the occasional poem, Lance has published academic articles in The Faulkner Journal and Reflections: A Journal of Public Writing, Civic Rhetoric, and Service Learning . His current research addresses the role of emotions in the writing process. This topic and others concerning emotions are explored in the Summer 2016 special issue of Composition Forum , which Lance directed as Guest Editor.
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