Assistant Professor of English at the University of Michigan and 2019 LSA Collegiate Fellow (English)
About
Daniel Valella's current book project examines the complex rhetorical strategies that US minority writers and their literary speakers have developed, from 1945 to the present, to forge identifications with diverse readers and to convince others to join them in eradicating racism, sexism, homophobia, and other social injustices. While authoritarian politicians have aimed to consolidate mass audiences through the power of scapegoating and the deployment of “alternative facts,” writers like Gloria Anzaldúa, Ralph Ellison, Gordon Henry Jr., and Ruth Ozeki have worked to cultivate different, more equitable relationships with audiences through expressions that illuminate shared rituals, iconographies, spiritual beliefs, locations, and ethical values. These expressions, Dr. Valella argues, constitute important antiracist and queer revisions of Aristotle’s ancient theory of rhetorical ethos (persuasion through “character”), setting ethos as a vital alternative to both logos (persuasion through reason and rationality) and pathos (persuasion through emotion and sentimentality).
Dr. Valella's research and teaching regularly focus on the artistic innovations, intellectual histories, and social experiences of those who are marginalized along the lines of race, gender, sexuality, class, and ability (among other axes of identity). Dr. Valella has also served as a mentor and instructor in several programs designed to foster diversity, equity, and inclusion in the academy. In the Berkeley Connect program, Dr. Valella worked closely with more than forty undergraduates—most of them transfer students, students of color, and/or first-generation college students—to connect them to many of Berkeley’s valuable yet often-obscured intellectual and cultural resources. In the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship program, Dr. Valella served for over four years as a graduate mentor to three Latinx scholars who plan to earn their doctorates in the near future.
Research Area Keyword(s):
20th- and 21st-century American literature; comparative ethnic studies; gender and sexuality studies; rhetorical theory
