Our faculty research and teach in the history of the western rhetorical tradition. Their research projects reconsider existing issues, movements and figures from across established time periods from the origins of Ancient Greek Rhetoric to the present day while striving to recover lost voices and venues of rhetorical engagement and agency. Faculty publish reference materials, research guides, textbooks, articles and monographs occurring at the nexus of rhetorical histories, hybrid research methodologies and cultural events.

The Rhetoric and Composition faculty have a long history of researching and teaching composition histories, theories and pedagogies—in addition to investigating writing program administration practices and engaging in this work. Our faculty routinely administer first-year programs, direct writing centers and lead university writing initiations. Additionally, they are recipients of Scholarship of Teaching and Graduate Student Mentoring awards and grants, have participated on national writing studies research teams and disseminate their writing studies research in articles and monographs, chapters and national reports.

Our faculty have a deep commitment to understanding how rhetoric is enacted in professional spaces, paying close attention to variations in medium, genre, audience and writing context. Their teaching and research covers sonic literacy, digital media design, user experience research and variations in communicative practice in a range of social media. Faculty publish this research in academic, workplace and public venues and have worked in industry as writing consultants and trainers.

Our faculty’s public and civic research is twofold: (1) exploring issues related to public pedagogy, experiential learning and mobile composition to understand the best ways we can encourage student writers to engage with local public and civic issues and (2) analyzing the rhetorical agency of social movements, marches and rhetors to trace and recognize social justice activism. Our faculty have published a wide range of interdisciplinary journal articles, book chapters and monographs in these areas.

Faculty working in American literature at Georgia State represent a wide range of research and teaching interests, including studies of early-American religions, Indigenous writers, American literary modernism, regionalism, post-modern literary experiments and much more. Our faculty draw on their expertise in specific literary genres, periods and movements to present exciting new work about how American writing illustrates and shapes the diverse elements of American history and culture.

Situated in the heart of the global capital of Black cultural production, our department has a core of scholars focused on African-American literature, history and culture, with plans to expand this area of expertise in the coming years.

The emphasis on U.S. literature that shaped Southern Studies in the late twentieth century has largely been supplanted by scholarship emphasizing a wider range of disciplinary and theoretical engagements. Our scholars working in Southern studies now routinely engage with Global South traditions, circum-Caribbean literatures and cultures, border studies, postcolonial theory, Indigenous literatures and cultures and studies of urban Southern landscapes, among other interests.

The Department of English has accomplished scholars in Medieval studies, seventeenth-century literary history and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writing.

The centrality of decolonial critique in contemporary thought has long been reflected in turns to literature from outside Western metropoles. Our scholars routinely draw on conceptual frameworks anchored in postcolonial thought: transnationalism, trans-Atlanticism, Indigenous studies, trauma theory, diaspora studies, border studies and so on. Concurrently, scholars have amplified the importance of writing in English from non-Western cultures, as well as writing in translation that reflects features of the postcolonial turn. These fields attract ambitious graduate students, feature prominently in academic conferences anchored to various periods and traditions and will continue to shape our profession in the coming decades.

The status of critical theory as a disciplinary nexus in literary studies has evolved substantially in the past two decades. The focus on continental philosophy and sweeping interpretive frameworks that prevailed in the 1990s, for instance, now includes increasing emphasis on queer-theoretical modalities, shifts in feminist thought, affect theory, trauma theory and so on. Our department has several faculty trained in adjacent fields whose expertise in critical theory informs both research and pedagogy.