Sarah Klotz
Associate Professor of Rhetoric
Biography
My research interests are rooted in understanding the role of literacy in American nation-building and using rhetorical theory as a lens to understand race and racialization in the United States. In 2021, I published a book on Native American students’ writing from the first off-reservation boarding school located in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Alongside my historical and archival research, I have an abiding interest in our writing classrooms and the ways that settler-colonial ideas about language assimilation continue to impact teaching practices today.
Recent Work
Writing Their Bodies: Restoring Rhetorical Relations at the Carlisle Indian School (Utah State University Press, 2021)
“Many Voices, One Page: Poetic Innovation and Intercultural Protest in ‘The Cherokee Mother.’” Lydia Sigourney and the Poetics of Dissent a Special Issue of ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance. Ed. Elizabeth Petrino and Mary Lou Kete. 69.3 (Fall 2023). 329-360.
Podcast episode: “Transcendentalism and Social Reform: Teaching and Research Opportunities”
“Drawing on Our Jesuit Mission to Make the Case for Rhetoric: A Profile of the Rhetoric and Composition Minor at Holy Cross.” Co-author Claire Jackson. Composition Forum. 51 (Spring 2023). https://compositionforum.com/issue/51/holy-cross.php
“Crafting a Writing Response Community Through Contract Grading.” Co-author Kristina Reardon. Journal of Response to Writing, 8(2), 1–21. 2022. https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/journalrw/vol8/iss2/5/
“Contract Grading as Anti-Racist Praxis in the Community College Context.” Co-author Carl Whithaus. First Year Composition at the Community College: Empowering the Teacher. Betsy Gilliland and Meryl Siegal eds. University of Michigan Press. 2021.
“Pictograph as Epitaph: Reading Algonquian Pictography in the Removal Period.” Early American Literature. 55.1 (Spring 2020): 177-207.