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Ph.D. Rhetoric Dissertations

The following table presents the dissertations of our Ph.D. Rhetoric graduates.

Year	Graduate	Dissertation
2024	Yishan Wang	Accommodated Social Imaginaries: How the U.S. and China Framed their 2018-2020 Trade Dispute
	Michael Laudenbach	Analyzing, Aligning, Assessing: A portable framework for corpus-based writing pedagogy at scale
2023	Richard G. Branscomb	Taking Aim: Rhetorical Conspiracism, Far-Right Extremism, and the Narrative Politics of Guns
	Nisha Lata Shanmugaraj	Negotiating the Model Minority: How Indian American Women Rearticulate Dominant Racial Discourse
	Laura E. McCann	Toxic Hope, Toxic Narratives: How Infertility Patients Counter Reproductive Myths Online
2022	Hannah Ringler	Close Statistical Reading: Rhetorical Interpretation of Computational Analyses of Texts at Scale
	Emily B. DeJeu	The Topoi of Proposal Writing: Characteristic Arguments of the Academic Research, Nonprofit, Business, and Public Change Proposal Genres
2021	Maria Feuer	Collaborative Writing Across English Proficiencies: Using Professionals' Experiences In The Workplace To Scaffold Students' Teamwork Practices
	Calvin Pollak	Leaks and the legitimation of state power: How the 2013 NSA disclosures reshaped debates over U.S. government surveillance
	Alexander Helberg	Appetite for Imagination: The Rhetoric of Hunger Advocacy and Political Imaginaries
	Craig "CP" Moreau	Teaching Teams to Innovate: The Successful Transfer of Difference-Driven Inquiry from the Workplace to the Classroom
2020	Margaret Goss	Temporal News Frames, Judgment and Gender: The Hillary Clinton Email Scandal
	Susan Tanner	The Rhetorical Force of the Law: An Analysis of the Language, Genre and Structure of Legal Opinions
	Ryan Mitchell	Private Parts, Public Selves: The Co-construction of Safe Sex before the Discovery of HIV
2018	Ana Cooke	Collaborating in Public: How Openness Shapes Global Warming Articles in Wikipedia
	Julia Deems	Achieving Mental Health Parity: A Rhetorical Analysis of a Social Change
	Derek Handley	Strategies for Performing Citizenship: Rhetorical Citizenship and the Black Freedom Movement
	Ryan Roderick	Self-regulation and Writing Transfer: How Students Navigate Unfamiliar Writing Situations
	Will Penman	An Aspirational Rhetoric of Anti- Racism: A Participatory Study of Responsive Engagement
2017	Amanda Berardi Tennant	Negotiating Concealable Identities Through Strategic Self-Reflection: The Rhetorics of Appalachian College Student Writers
	Garrett Stack	The Sierra Club and the Rhetorical Sublime
	Mary Glavan	The Rhetoric of Situated Advocacy: Disability and the Price of Persuasion
	Jessica Harrell	Emerging Memories: A Rhetorical History of Remembering after September 11, 2001
2016	Carolyn Commer	Shaping Education Policy in the Era of Neoliberal Reform: Lessons from the 2006 Spellings Commission
	Ari Klein	Becoming the Federal Reserve Chairman: The Micro-Discursive Construction of Administrative Authority as a Rhetorical Appeal to Ethos
	Justin Mando	Fracking and the Construction of Proximity: The Public Rhetoric of Place in an Environmental Controversy
	Doug Phillips	Police Brutality in News Media: Narratives and Narrative Icons as Argumentation and Markers of Communal Identity
	Kristin Shimmin	Rhetorical Circulation and Discursive Perceptions of Science: How science’s public role emerged in the late 18th and early 19th centuries
2014	Logan Schmidt	Greening the Technical: An Analysis of Expertise in a Deliberative Democratic Forum
	Alexis Teagarden	Whose School: the National and Local Rhetoric of Education Reform
2013	Doug Cloud	The Gay Warrior and the Untroubled Comrade: The Rhetoric of Identity Categories in Public Discourse
	Ashley Karlin	Rhetorical Motives for Engagement in Dialogues Between Buddhism and Science
	William Marcellino	Talk Like a Marine: A qualitative and quantitative analysis of the link between USMC vernacular epideictic and public deliberative speech
	Tom Mitchell	Rhetoric of Place: Shaping a Struggling Neighborhood's Reputation
	Mark Thompson	Institutional Rhetoric, Argument, and the House Un-American Activities Committee, 1955-1956
	Kari Lundgren	Rhetorically Constituting and Contesting Identity Norms for American Catholic Sisters in Public Discourse
2012	Dan Baumgardt	A Historical View of Science Accommodation: The Case of Sociolinguistics and African American English
	Meaghan O'Keefe	Everything New Is Old Again: The American Catholic Bishops' Politics of Conscience
	Hilary Schuldt	Sakamoto's Double Burden: Creating and Using Interpublic Relationships as Rhetorical Resources in the Japanese American Courier
	Emily Stark	Striving for Legitimacy: Rhetorical Strategies of Expertise in an Immunological Controversy
2011	Necia Werner	From communalism to crowdsourcing: How values shape peer review at scientific journals
2009	Jennifer Andrus	The "Excited Utterance" and the Rhetorical Agent: How Language Ideology Shapes Agency in the American Law of Evidence
	Nathan Atkinson	This is Crossroads: How Newsreels Made the 1946 Atomic Tests at Bikini Atoll Public
	Ronald Placone	Incivility in Written Discourse: The United States Supreme Court and Abortion
	Robin Reames-Henry	Finding Belief in the Words: The Rhetoric of Paul the Apostle's Confession of Faith
2008	Erin Friess	The User-Centered Design Process: Novice Designers' Use of Evidence in Designing from Data
2007	Neeta Bhasin	Nation and Ethnicity in Everyday Lives of Immigrants: Toward a Rhetorical Approach to Identity
	Ludmila Hyman	Balancing the Concrete and Abstract in Public Intellectual Reasoning: A Study of Hannah Arendt
2006	Craig Stewart	Orders of Discourse in the Science-Based Controversy Over "Reparative Therapy" for Homosexuality
2005	Peter Cramer	A Medium-Based Rhetorical Analysis of Newspaper Coverage of the Brooklyn Museum Controversy
	Susan Lawrence	Accounting for the Past: Memory, Responsibility, and The Political Motivation Requirement in the South Africa Truth and Reconciliation Commission Amnesty Hearings
	Terri Palmer	The Rhetoric of Probability Mathematics
	Danielle Wetzel	A Temporal Approach to Organizational Rhetoric: A Case Study of the Pittsburgh Citizen Police Review Board

View Ph.D. Rhetoric Dissertations before 2005:

Susan Gilpin (2004). Heuretic Engagement: Everyday Talk about Social Issues.
Susan Hagan (2003). Visual/Verbal Meaning Collaboration: A Conceptual Framework for the Study of Communication Design.
Gil Wilkes (2003). From Rupture to Closure: How Communicators Resolve Signal From Noise.
Chris Eisenhart (2003). Waco Decade: A Rhetorical Study of Commemorative Discourse.
Martha S. Cheng (2003). Ethos and Narrative In An Online Classroom Chat.
Jeff Collins (2003). Variations in Written English: Characterizing the Rhetorical Language Choices in the Brown Corpus of Texts.
Susan Swan (2002). Rhetorical Praxis for Social Change.
Chris Werry (2002). Rhetoric and Reflexivity in Chomskyan and Cognitive Linguistics.
Jay Gordon (2001). Appropriating Behavioral and Cognitive Psychology in the Study and Teaching of Written Composition: Problems And Possibilities.
Sean Zdenek (2001). Passing for Human: Rhetoric, Software Agency, and Communicatively Competent Machines.
Kenneth Zuroski (2001). The Rhetoricity of Manufacture: Rhetorical Practices at Westinghouse Electric Corporation.
Amanda Jane Young (2000). Patients as Problem Solvers: Toward a Rhetoric of Agency in Healthcare.
Susan Harkness Regli (2000). Electronic Mail for Asynchronous Collaboration: Comprehension Effects of Context Representation.
Priscilla Kelly (2000). Audience Theory and its Treatment in American Composition Textbooks 1850-1920.
Thomas Joseph Hajduk (1999). The Effect of External Representation in Computer-Mediated versus Face-to-Face Collaborative Peer Review on More and Less Experienced Writers.
Jennifer D. Flach (1999). Making a Difference with Difference: A Study of Mutual Situated Meaning Construction through Intercultural Interpretation and Inquiry.
Patricia Gail Wojahn (1999).Comunication in Peer Reviews: Effects of Computer Interfaces, Problem Equivocality, and Initial Annotations.
Joel Bloch (1998). Contrastive Rhetoric in American English and Chinese: A Study of Intertextual Knowledge in Different Discourses.
Loel Kim Robinson (1998). Students Respond to Teacher Comments: A Comparison of Online Voice and Written Modalities.
Margaret McCaffrey (1998). Constructing Gender through Representation: The Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) of World War II.
Mark Werner (1998). The Collaborative Landscape of a Software Development Project.
N. Ann Chenoweth (1997). Reading for Revision: A Comparison of Teachers' and Students' Judgments.
Patricia L. Dunmire (1996). Constructing a Projected Event: A Critical Linguistic Analysis of the 1990 Persian Gulf Conflict.
David Fleming (1996). The Rhetoric of Design: Argument, Story, Picture, and Talk in a Student Design Project.
Christine Murphy Silk (1996). Narrative in Rhetorical Argument.
Karen Rossi Schnakenberg (1996). Aristotle's Rhetoric in American Rhetorical Scholarship 1950-1965.
Eliza Beth Littleton (1995). Emerging Rhetorical Knowledge for Writing: The Effect of Audience-Presence on Five- Through Nine-Year-Olds' Speech.
Lili Fox Velez (1995). Interpreting and Writing in the Laboratory: A Study of Novice Biologists as Novice Rhetors.
Philippa Jane Benson (1994). Problems in Picturing Text.
Maureen Goggin (1994). The Shaping of a Discipline: An Historical Study of the Authorizing Role of Professional Journals in Rhetoric and Composition, 1950-1990.
Elenore Ann Long (1994). The Rhetoric of Literate Social Action: Mentors Negotiating Intercultural Images and Literacy.
Cynthia A. Cochran (1993). Rhetorical Relevance in Reading and Writing.
Maureen A. Mathison (1993). Authoring the Critique: Taking Critical Stances on Disciplinary Texts.
Ann Blakeslee (1992). Inventing Scientific Discourse: Dimensions of Rhetorical Knowledge in Physics.
Lorraine Higgins (1992). Argument as Construction: A Framework and Method.
Charles Hill (1992). Thinking Through Controversy: The Effect of Writing on the Argument Evaluation Processes of First-Year College Students.
Bradley Mehlenbacher (1992). Rhetorical Moves in Scientific Proposal Writing: A Case Study from Biochemical Engineering.
Rebecca Burnett (1991). Conflict in the Collaborative Planning of Coauthors: How Substantive Conflict, Representation of Task, and Dominance Relate to High-Quality Documents.
John Carson (1991). Writing Across the Business Disciplines at Robert Morris College: A Case Study.
Linda Levine (1991). The Argument on Language and The Language of Argument: Kenneth Burke and Wilbur Samuel Howell.
Wayne Campbell Peck (1991). Community Advocacy: Composing for Action.
Joseph Petraglia (1991). Exploring the Effects of Realism on Arousal and Rhetorical Representation.
David Wallace (1991). From Intention to Text: Developing, Implementing, and Judging Intentions for Writing.
Sarah Dennis Eldridge (1990). Discovery by Design: A Writing Course for Visual Artists.
Stuart Greene (1990). Writing from Sources: Authority in Text and Task.
Michael E. Palmquist (1990). The Lexicon of the Classroom: Language and Learning in Writing Classrooms.
Wendie Wulff (1990). Writer and Graphic Designer Collaboration: A Case Study of Process and Product.
John Ackerman (1989). Reading and Writing in the Academy: A Comparison of Two Disciplines.
M. Diane Langston (1989). Engagement in Writing.
Barbara Sitko (1989). Writers' Cognitive and Decision Processes: Revising After Feedback.
Richard Young (1989). Cognitive Processes in Argumentation: An Exploratory Study of Management Consulting Expertise.

Department of English

Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences

Ph.D. Rhetoric Dissertations

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Dissertation

View Ph.D. Rhetoric Dissertations before 2005:

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