College of Humanities People
Wendy Hesford, Professor
Department of English: http://english.osu.edu/
518 Denney Hall, 164 West 17th Avenue, Columbus, OH, 43210
Email: hesford.1@osu.edu
Phone: 614-292-6065
Office Hours:
Autumn TR 11:30-1:00 and by appointment
General Background:
Ph.D., New York University: Areas of research and teaching interests: Modern and contemporary rhetorical theory, visual culture studies, human rights rhetoric, autobiography, and transnational feminist studies. Author of Framing Identities: Autobiography and the Politics of Pedagogy (University of Minnesota Press, 1999), winner of the 1999 W. Ross Winterowd Book Award; co-editor with Wendy Kozol of two collections Haunting Violations: Feminist Criticism and the Crisis of the "Real" (University of Illinois Press, 2001) and Just Advocacy? Women's Human Rights, Transnational Feminisms, and The Politics of Representation, (Rutgers University Press, 2005); and Rhetorical Visions: Reading and Writing in a Visual Culture, a textbook co-authored with Brenda Brueggemann (Prentice Hall, 2007).
Hesford's latest book Spectacular Rhetorics: Human Rights Visions, Recognitions, Feminisms, published by Duke University Press, 2011, examines the visual rhetorics and ocular epistemology that underwrites human rights law, shapes the process of cultural and legal recognition, and delimits public responses to violence and injustice. For more detail on her new book see http://www.dukeupress.edu/Catalog/ViewProduct.php?productid=17962
Her current project "Children's Rights, Sympathetic Visibilities, and States of Exception" investigates contemporary cultural productions (literary, photographic, cinematic) that dramatize children living in varied states of legal exception and social exclusion (stateless children, incarcerated children, and children in war zones).
She is the recepient of numerous awards and grants, including a NEH Summer Seminar fellowship, 2007 Visiting Scholar at Columbia University's Center for the Study of Human Rights, several OSU Seed Grants, OSU Research Enhancement Grants, Coca-Cola Critical Difference for Women Grants, and the Modern Language Association's Florence Howe essay award. She has published or forthcoming essays in a range of journals, including PMLA, Biography, College English, Journal of Human Rights, Humanity, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, and TDR: Journal of Performance Studies, among others. She is past President of the Women's Caucus of the Modern Language Association and is currently Chair of the Executive Committee of the MLA Division of the History and Theory of Rhetoric and Composition.Rhetoric and Composition
Gender and Sexuality Studies Area
Human Rights Rhetoric
