FIELDS:
- Composition/Rhetoric & Literacy Studies
- Women's Rhetorics
- Critical Pedagogy
- Public Sphere Theory
BIOGRAPHY:
Brenda Glascott is Director of the Honors College and Professor of Humanities at Portland State University. She holds a PhD in English with a specialization in Composition, Rhetoric, and Literacy Studies from the University of Pittsburgh. Her research area includes the history of women’s rhetorics and literacy practices, gender and rhetoric, and public sphere theory. She has published in College English, Reader, Reflections: A Journal of Community-Engaged Writing and Rhetoric, and several edited collections. Her co-edited collection, Literacy and Pedagogy in an Age of Misinformation and Disinformation, was published in 2021. She is co-founder and Managing Editor of the peer-reviewed open-access journal Literacy in Composition Studies. Her current research is a rhetorical history of women’s labor activism in early twentieth century New York City, particularly in relation to the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire.
Dr. Glascott’s research area includes the history of women’s rhetorics and literacy practices, gender and rhetoric, and public sphere theory. Her published research considers how women navigate rhetorical agency in relation to the ideological constrictions imposed by their literacy sponsors and historical contexts. She has been particularly interested in how rhetorical and literacy conventions embed cultural values within composing processes and genres, reading practices, and conceptions of rhetorical agency. Her interest in the interdisciplinary field of Literacy Studies led her to co-found the scholarly journal Literacy in Composition Studies, for which she is the managing editor. Her current research project examines how women labor activists fostered rhetorical agency and transformed the public spheres they operated within in response to the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire (1911) that horrified the city of New York and the national public. In this project, she is developing a theory of micropublics as a way of understanding the overlapping and conflicting rhetorics emerging from the coalition of middle-class Anglo and working-class ethnically marked women activists that effectively used the fire as a catalyst for legislative action. She has presented her research internationally, and has given several invited talks, including one to the Huntington Women’s Studies Seminar hosted by the Huntington Library.
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS:
Tara Lockhart, Brenda Glascott, Juli Parrish, Chris Warnick, and Justin Lewis, editors. Literacy and Pedagogy in an age of Misinformation and Disinformation, Parlor Press, 2021.
Glascott, Brenda. “Affection, Intimacy, and Labor Organizing: Queering Public Activism in the Long Nineteenth Century.” Nineteenth-Century American Activist Rhetorics, edited by Patricia Bizzell and Lisa Zimmerelli, MLA, 2020, pp. 163-178.
Lockhart, Tara, Brenda Glascott, Justin Lewis, Holly Middleton, Juli Parrish, and Chris Warnick. “Investigate, Target, Implement, Persevere: Understanding the Academic Publishing Process through Editors’ Eyes.” Explanation Points: Publishing in Rhetoric and Composition, edited by John R. Gallagher and Danielle Nicole DeVoss, Utah State Press, 2019, pp. 274-279.
Glascott, Brenda. Review of Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World. Directed by Jessica DeSpain, Jennifer Brady, Melissa White, and Jill Anderson, Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville. Digital Critical Edition. Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers, vol. 34, no. 2, 2017, pp. 388-390. Invited review.
Glascott, Brenda. “Revising Letters and Reclaiming Space: The Case for Expanding the Search for Nineteenth-Century Women’s Letter-Writing Rhetoric into Imaginative Literature.” College English vol. 78, no. 2, 2015, pp. 162-182.
Glascott, Brenda. “Evangelical Masculinity in The Pilgrim Boy: A Historical Analysis with Methodological Implications.” Mapping Christian Rhetorics: Connecting Conversations, Charting New Territories, edited by Michael-John DePalma and Jeffrey M. Ringer, Routledge, 2014, pp. 141-158. Invited chapter.
Awarded Book of the Year by the Religious Communication Association.
Glascott, Brenda. “Constricting Keywords: Rhetoric and Literacy in our History Writing.” Literacy in Composition Studies vol.1, no. 1, 2013, n. pag. Web. Symposium essay.
Glascott, Brenda. “Dying Readers: Power and Self-Abnegation in Nineteenth-Century Evangelical Literacy Narratives.” Reader vol. 63/64, 2012/2013, pp. 84-113.
Glascott, Brenda. “An (Em)bodied Workshop: When Service Learning Gets Bawdy.” Reflections: A Journal of Writing, Service-Learning, and Community Literacy vol. 9, no. 2, 2010, pp. 70-88.