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’s research and teaching interests include rhetorical history and theory, genre theory, women’s rhetorics, spatial and material rhetorics, and scientific and professional discourse. 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.
Dr. Applegarth’s current book project examines links among art, activism, materiality, and temporality in youth-led social movements from the 1990s to the present. Additional research projects include studies of vocational advice for women, embodied epideictic rhetoric, and collective activism among early 20th-century women’s organizations, especially Business and Professional Women’s Clubs, in Greensboro and throughout the U.S., as well as projects on feminist ethics, qualitative methods, and archival research.
An affiliated faculty member with the WGS program, Dr. Applegarth teaches graduate and undergraduate courses related to women’s writing, genre theory, autobiographical writing, environmental rhetoric, spatial, material, and embodied rhetoric, and the history and practice of rhetoric.
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:
P.O. Box 26170
Greensboro, NC 27402
Phone: 336-334-5311
Fax: 336-334-3281
Email: english@uncg.edu
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