The doctoral degree in Rhetoric and Writing prepares students to conduct research and teach courses in writing studies, digital rhetoric, experience architecture, and technical and professional communication. Students learn to do this work by engaging with scholarship, learning with faculty, collaborating on research teams, producing multimodal content for organizations, understanding people-focused experiences, teaching in our programs, and working with local and global communities. Through these experiences, students examine issues of accessibility, ethics, literacy, and storytelling through writing, composing, and making. Central to this work is applying and developing theories and methodologies to be a positive force for structural change, growth, and innovation with an emphasis on culture, context, and access.
This degree prepares students to lead in various workplaces, including academia, civic, corporate, government, and nonprofit organizations. Our students go on to administer programs in academia, conduct user experience research for organizations, design products and services in industry, manage international projects, publish in academic and trade journals, and research and teach in higher education contexts.
Our learning community offers students a unique academic space to explore scholarly, intellectual, and pedagogical pathways in rhetoric and writing studies. We work to provide an intellectual community that seeks out and welcomes all individuals, and that openly makes space for the broadest possible spectrum of diversity across categories of age, life experience, gender, abilities, race, ethnicity, class, religion, spirituality, sexual orientation, and geographic identification. Every member of our academic community has something important to contribute to our intellectual community and to the future of our discipline.