Patricia Bizzell

Biography

Patricia Bizzell is a Distinguished Professor of English Emerita, retired as of September 2019. In 41 years at Holy Cross, Bizzell founded and directed a writing-across-the-curriculum program and a peer-tutoring facility (now grown into the Writing Center). Bizzell also served as Director of both the College Honors Program and the English Honors Program, Chair of the English Department and Speaker of the Faculty (head of the faculty senate).

Bizzell is a Fellow of the Rhetoric Society of America, of which she is their past president. From the Conference on College Composition and Communication, Bizzell won the Outstanding Book Award in 1992, for the first edition of "The Rhetorical Tradition," co-authored with Bruce Herzberg, and the Exemplar Award for lifetime achievement in 2008. She taught at Sogang, the Jesuit university in Seoul, South Korea, in 2011 and held the Cardin Chair in the Humanities at Loyola University Maryland in 2015-16.

Since Bizzell arrived at Holy Cross in 1978, she has taught academic writing at both the first-year and upper-division undergraduate levels almost every year, and she has always loved coaching writing with students of diverse backgrounds. Bizzell has valued teaching rhetoric theory and practice at both the beginning and advanced levels. She's also enjoyed teaching courses on the American nineteenth century, taking a rhetorical approach to the many social justice issues that animated written, oral and visual texts of this era.

Accustomed to engaging students with no prior knowledge of rhetoric, in her most recent book, Rhetorics of Fear and Rage: An American Tradition (Parlor Press. 2026), Bizzell offers a collection of non-fiction essays for general readers. The book outlines a theory of rhetoric that explains the problems with civic debates that try to rely on facts, and it illustrates an alternative that describes the functions of common habits of mind in public discourse. Illustrations span American history from Revolutionary times to the present, touching on controversial topics including women’s rights, immigration, the Confederate flag, and scientific evidence for eugenics, vaccine threats, and climate change.