Rhetoric & Writing
Welcome to the home of Rhetoric and Writing at the University of New Mexico. Our program is undergoing an exciting period of growth and change with the hiring of seven new tenure-track faculty members over the past few years. Our faculty’s diverse specialties include technical communication, language diversity, second language writing, writing program administration, K-12 composition, and multimodal composition. One of these faculty members holds a unique joint appointment with the Department of Language, Literacy, and Sociocultural Studies in the College of Education, which enables our students to make cross-disciplinary connections in their research.
Students in our programs have a number of opportunities to gain experience in their area of interest. Our undergraduates can take part in an internship situated in a variety of non-profit organizations, institutions, and businesses. Many of our graduate students teach our Core Writing classes, including English 1110, 1120, 2210, and 2120. Graduate students also have the opportunity to serve in various administrative capacities in our Core Writing program, where we are currently re-envisioning the ways we teach developmental writing, multimodal composition, and L2 writing. Other students are involved in the Writing Across Communities initiative, which aims to support writing instruction not only across the curriculum but across broader communities, something evidenced in our graduate-student-run Celebration of Student Writing and Community Writing Center. Our graduates have pursued a variety of career paths, including the following: technical writing, K-12 teaching, university professorships; grant writing; and commercial publishing and editing.
Rhetoric and Writing Faculty
Director: Bethany Davila, Associate Professor
- race, whiteness, language diversity, standardness, qualitative research, writing program administration
Stephen Benz, Associate Professor
- literary journalism; the essay as a genre; prose style; travel writing
Tiffany Bourelle, Associate Professor
- multimodal composition; online writing instruction; service learning; technical communication
Andrew Bourelle, Associate Professor
- classical rhetoric; multimodal composition; online writing instruction; technical and professional writing
Pisarn Bee Chamcharatsri, Associate Professor
- L2 writing; identity; emotion
Cristyn L. Elder, Associate Professor
- writing program administration; writing across the curriculum; composition and writing center theory and practice; multilingual writers; research methods
Julie Newmark, Principal Lecturer
- technical and professional writing; indigenous rhetoric; indigenous activism; visual rhetoric; digital publishing; archival research
