David Gold

I'm a Professor of English, Women's and Gender Studies, and Education at UM and a member of the Coalition of Feminist Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition. My work in women's studies focuses on the history of women's rhetorics, with a particular emphasis on women's rhetorical education and participation in the public sphere.

Teaching Interests: I love teaching at UM and offer a variety of courses in rhetoric, writing, and women's and gender studies. Recent undergraduate offerings include Dangerous Women—Activism in the Progressive Era, Women’s Rhetorics from Suffrage to Today, Literacy in a Digital Age, and Writing for the Real World. Recent graduate courses include Literacies in American Life and What Is Writing For. As much as possible, I try to make my courses hands-on through student-led discussions, in-class workshops, and opportunities for research. I also try to help students to produce writing they would be proud sharing with an audience outside of class. In my Magazine Writing course, students publish an online current affairs magazine, The Mich, and in my women’s rhetoric courses, students have applied feminist principles to editing Wikipedia, a powerful yet gendered knowledge-making space.

Scholarly interests: My scholarly interests include the history of rhetoric, feminist rhetorics, composition pedagogy, and digital rhetorics, and I am particularly interested in the experiences of non-elite populations of students, the voices of marginalized rhetors, and the means by which ordinary citizens use language to effect change I have written, coauthored, or coedited four volumes: Rhetoric at the Margins: Revising the History of Writing Instruction in American Colleges, 1873-1947; the collection Rhetoric, History, and Women’s Oratorical Education: American Women Learn to Speak (with Catherine Hobbs); Educating the New Southern Woman: Speech, Writing, and Race at the Public Women’s Colleges, 1884-1945 (with Catherine Hobbs); and the collection Women at Work: Rhetorics of Gender and Labor in the US, 1830-1950 (with Jessica Enoch). I am currently studying Black women’s rhetorical activism in the age of Jim Crow and have a recent essay in Rhetoric Society Quarterly on African American suffrage rhetorics in the Crisis.

I am also interested in how technologies of literacy affect research and writing practices: this work includes two essays coauthored with UM PhD students: “Going Public in an Age of Digital Digital Anxiety” in Composition Forum examines the rhetorical challenges students experience in online writing, and “Who’s Afraid of Facebook?” in College Composition and Communication is a large-scale survey of student’s online writing practices (see an op/ed preview here).