PhD Program Redesign Updates

PhD program will invite applications in December 2024 to join our newly revised PhD program in fall 2025

Update: May 2024

Dear friends, colleagues, alums, students, potential and future applicants:

We write to excitedly share an update regarding our PhD program in Rhetoric and Writing. We decided to pause program admissions in Fall 2023. The landscape of our field and subfields and, indeed, the landscape of our institutions and our country, have changed drastically over the past years. We built our PhD program 20 years ago, and it was a successful program, but we decided it was one that we needed to put on pause so we could reflect, imagine, innovate, and transform in the face of this change in order to best imagine the futures of our field, our students, and our graduates.

You can read our early messages and updates, along with see details about the work we’ve undertaken, below this update.

We are delighted to share that as of May 30, 2024, our revised PhD program has received full institutional and academic governance approval.

Over the next couple of weeks, we will revise this area of our web site to reflect our new program and provide complete information about our exciting revisions.

We invite interested applicants to reach out, ask questions, get to know us, and explore our new program, course offerings, and goals. We’d also be delighted to share what we did and what we learned with others who may be in the process of crafting a graduate program or revising an existing graduate program.

We look forward to hearing from you, and we’re eager to review applications and welcome PhD students to our program in fall of 2025!

Liza Potts, Associate Chair and Director of Graduate Programs (lpotts@msu.edu)
Dànielle Nicole DeVoss, Department Chair (devossda@msu.edu)

*************************************************
PhD program admissions pause until December 2024 for applicants to begin work in Fall 2025
Update: September 2023

Dear friends, colleagues, alums, students, potential and future applicants:

We write to share an update regarding our PhD program in Rhetoric and Writing. Last year, we announced that we decided to take a pause (our initial update from November 2022 appears below). We noted that the landscape of our field and subfields and, indeed, the landscape of our institutions and our country, have changed drastically over the past years. The PhD program we built 20 years ago is a robust one, but it’s one that needs to pause, reflect, and transform in the face of this change in order to best imagine the futures of our field, our students, and our graduates.

This was a choice—certainly not an easy one, but a choice we made in conversation and collaboration. We were not put into moratorium; we were not shut down. We chose to take a pause and we write to provide an update on this pause.

We noted the pleasure and privilege of working over the past 20 years with an absolutely amazing group of faculty and PhD students. We’ve watched our alums go on to do important work in the field–as teachers, scholars, and leaders. We are proud of what we’ve accomplished, and even more, we’re proud of those students who have gone on to be the next generation of leaders who define the work of Rhetoric and Writing studies.

Our alums engage in impactful work. They serve as editors of journals and as editorial board members. They serve as chairs and executive committee members of professional organizations and disciplinary communities. They organize and lead special interest groups, caucuses, and conferences. They work as institutional change agents, activists, and advocates. They contribute to and they continue to shape what rhetoric and writing studies is, what we do, how we make change, and why our work matters.

We provide this update to share what we’ve been doing and where we’re headed. Last year, we:

  • interviewed faculty to create a better sense of existing strengths, which include technical communication; experience architecture; computers and writing; multimodal composing; cultural rhetorics; queer rhetorics; writing program history, theory, and administration; writing center history, theory, and administration
  • researched PhD programs in rhetoric and composition studies in the U.S. and produced a landscape analysis
  • completed a logic model activity to identify needs, inputs, activities, and outcomes and to anticipate needs, inputs, activities, and outcomes
  • drew from the conversations and research to propose possible configurations of our PhD core course requirements

This year, academic year 2023-2024, we will:

  • distribute a survey of our community of PhD alums, inviting them to share experiences, thoughts, and recommendations, and we will then work with the experiences and the data that emerges
  • continue to reflect on and also revise and reframe the mission, vision, and goals of our PhD program revise and reframe the coursework and comprehensive exams process of the PhD program (the core, the concentration, and the dissertation prospectus)
  • create and shepherd required institutional materials, requests, proposals, etc., to the appropriate department, college, and university review committees and through the Provost, President, Board of Trustees and U.S. Department of Education
  • and, down the road, present and publish on these processes to share our experiences and hopefully to provide tools, means, and resources for other programs navigating—and leading—change

This is heavy lifting—programmatically, departmentally, and institutionally. This is heavy lifting—within writing studies and our affiliated, constellated subfields. We anticipate and our goal is to invite applications in December 2024 for students to begin work in our PhD program in Rhetoric and Writing in Fall 2025. That said, again, this is heavy lifting. If we have to extend our deadlines, we will communicate this as soon as we can. And, as we mentioned earlier, we want to be transparent across our processes and conversations. We want to share what we’re doing, thinking, and imagining. If you’d like to hear more, if you want an update, or if you just want to check in, please feel free to do so.


The Rhetoric and Writing Graduate Advisory Committee (RWGAC) in the Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and Cultures at Michigan State University

Liza Potts, Associate Chair and Director of Graduate Programs
Kristin Arola
Stuart Blythe
Dànielle Nicole DeVoss
Sara Doan
Roland Dumavor
Steven Fraiberg
Bump Halbritter
Julie Lindquist
Casey McArdle
Grace Pregent
Mike Ristich
Trixie Long Smith
Crystal VanKooten

 *************************************************

PhD program admissions pause until December 2024 for applicants to begin work in Fall 2025

November 2022

Dear friends, colleagues, alums, students, potential and future applicants:

We write to share an update regarding our PhD program in Rhetoric and Writing. 

We’ve had the pleasure and privilege of working over the past 20 years with an absolutely amazing group of faculty and PhD students. We’ve watched our alums go on to do incredible work in the field–as teachers, scholars, and leaders. We are proud of what we’ve accomplished, and even more, we’re proud of those students who have gone on to be the next generation of leaders who define the work of Rhetoric and Writing studies. 

And now, it’s time for us to take a pause.

The landscape of our field and subfields and, indeed, the landscape of our institutions and our country, have changed drastically over the past years. The PhD program we built 20 years ago is a robust one, but it’s one that needs to pause, reflect, and transform in the face of this change in order to  best imagine the futures of our field, our students, and our graduates.

Institutionally, MSU now has a shared vision for our future – a 2030 Strategic Plan. We also have a Diversity, Equity, Inclusion (and Justice) Plan developed and we’re in the process of transitioning our goals to action items. 

We are pausing admissions to our PhD program for the next two years, which will give us time to do the important work of reflection, reassessment, and reinvention.  We will next invite applicants in December 2024 to begin work in Fall 2025. In Fall 2020, we relaunched our MA in Rhetoric and Writing program after some exciting revisions. We will continue to invite, support, nurture, and mentor MA students while we’re working on our PhD program.

We have, of course, reviewed and revised our curriculum, our exams, and our processes over the years, but we feel that now is the time to devote as much energy as required to rebuild who we are and what sort of experience we offer the students who join us to do their doctoral work here in the Rhetoric and Writing Studies program at Michigan State University.

We’ve already begun a process of reflection and reinvention that entails design thinking exercises, user-experience-guided research, and reflective conversations among ourselves and with our alums. We plan to continue this work over the coming year, and then to guide our program and curriculum changes through our academic governance processes.

We want to be transparent across our processes and conversations. We want to share what we’re doing, thinking, and imagining. If you’d like to hear more, if you want an update, or if you just want to check in, please feel free to do so.


The Rhetoric and Writing Graduate Advisory Committee (RWGAC) in the Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures at Michigan State University

Liza Potts, Associate Chair and Director of Graduate Programs
Kristin Arola
Stuart Blythe
Julie Lindquist
Keaton Kirkpatrick
Trixie Long Smith