Carnegie Mellon University

Ph.D. Rhetoric Dissertations

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

Year

Graduate

Dissertation

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

Will Penman

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