Email: Risa_Applegarth@uncg.edu
Office: MHRA 3109
Phone: 336-334-3967
Ph.D. University of North Carolina-2009
M.A. University of North Carolina-2005
B.A. Carleton College-2003
Dr. Applegarth researches and teaches in rhetoric, writing studies, genre studies, and childhood studies. Her published scholarship includes books and articles that investigate the rhetorical strategies of youth-led activist collectives, the role of gender, race, disability, and embodied rhetoric in professional and scientific communities, and the impact and circulation of personal writing, reflective writing, and nonfiction narratives. Her work makes use of varied methodological approaches, including historical case studies, genre-based textual analysis, media analysis, archival research drawing on unpublished and institutional documents, and interview-based qualitative research.
Dr. Applegarth’s current research examines activism, age, and temporality in youth-led social movements from the 1990s to the present. Her book Just Kids: Youth Activism and Rhetorical Agency was published in 2024 by the Ohio State University Press. Combining case studies of activist collectives with retrospective interviews, Just Kids investigates how age both facilitates and constrains rhetorical opportunities for young activists, contributing to contemporary studies of childhood, age, and rhetorical agency.
Additional recent projects include publications on feminist ethics, rhetorical agency, and embodied rhetoric, as well as contributions to the Cape Fear Watershed Project, an NEH-funded interdisciplinary and cross-institutional collaboration led by Dr. Aaron Allen.
Dr. Applegarth’s first book, Rhetoric in American Anthropology: Gender, Genre, and Science (Pittsburgh 2014), examines how anthropologists transformed their field from the “welcoming science,” uniquely open to amateurs, women, and people of color, into a professional scientific discipline in the early 20th century. This study recuperates the writings of professional researchers whose experimental genres–folklore collections, ethnographic novels, and autobiographies–reopened debates over how scientific knowledge could be made. This project earned the 2010 James Berlin Memorial Outstanding Dissertation Award from the Conference on College Composition and Communication, a New Faculty Research Grant and a Summer Excellence Research Grant from UNCG, and the CCCC Outstanding Book Award in 2016.
An affiliated faculty member with the program in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Dr. Applegarth teaches graduate and undergraduate courses related to pedagogy, rhetoric, disability, embodiment, genre, life writing, environmental writing, and contemporary activism.
2016 Faculty and Staff Excellence Awards – Teaching Excellence and O. Max Gardner Awards
2019 Junior Research Excellence Award-Watch the video here
Department of English
UNC Greensboro
Physical Address:
3143 Moore Humanities and Research Administration Building
Greensboro, NC 27412
Mailing Address:
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Greensboro, NC 27402
Phone: 336-334-5311
Fax: 336-334-3281
Email: english@uncg.edu
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