Vanessa Kraemer Sohan

Dr. Sohan's research and teaching focus on translingual and transmodal approaches to literacy practice, feminist historiography, "alternative" writing and rhetorics, and material and cultural rhetorics (particularly quilts and quiltmaking). Dr. Sohan received her PhD and MA in Rhetoric & Composition from the University of Louisville, and her BS in Culture and Politics from Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service.

Her first book, Lives, Letters, and Quilts: Women and Everyday Rhetorics of Resistance(University of Alabama Press, 2019) provides case studies of how women writers, activists and artists without power resist dominant social, cultural and political structures through the deployment of unconventional means and materials. Her scholarship has also appeared in College English, Pedagogy, JAC, and in the collection Reworking English in Rhetoric and Composition: Global Interrogations, Local Interventions(SIUP, 2014). 

Previous course offerings include Writing Across Conventions, Rhetorical Theory, Alternative Writing & Rhetorics (focusing on translingual and transmodal approaches to academic writing), Feminist Rhetorics, Material/Cultural Writing & Rhetorics, Introduction to Writing Studies, Advanced Writing & Research, and Writing & Rhetoric I and II.

Dr. Sohan currently serves as the associate director of the Graduate Program; is a member of committees related to the BA and MA tracks in writing and rhetoric; and is an at-large executive committee member of the Conference on College Composition and Communication Transnational Standing Group.