David Gold

I'm a Professor of English, specializing in rhetoric, composition, and writing studies. I also have courtesy appointments in the Department of Women's and Gender Studies and the College of Education and serve as a program affiliate to the Joint PhD Program in English and Education and as faculty co-advisor for the UM Language and Rhetorical Studies Group.

Teaching Interests: I love teaching at UM. I offer a variety of courses in rhetoric, writing, and literacy studies, and I enjoy working with students at all levels, from first-year students writing their first college essays to PhD candidates writing their dissertations. Recent undergraduate offerings include Literacy in a Digital Age, Writing for the Real World, Dangerous Women—Feminine Activism in the Progressive Era, and Women’s Rhetorics from Suffrage to Today. Recent graduate courses include Researching and Teaching Digital Literacies, Writing Citizens, and What Is Writing For. As much as possible, I try to make my courses hands-on through student-led discussions and in-class workshops. 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, focusing on issues of interest to local readers, and in my women's rhetoric courses, students apply 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 women's rhetorical practices, the voices of marginalized rhetors, and the means by which ordinary citizens use language to effect change. My work has appeared in College Composition and Communication, College English, Peitho, Rhetoric Review, and other venues, and I have written, coauthored, or coedited four volumes: Rhetoric at the Margins: Revising the History of Writing Instruction in American Colleges, 1873-1947 (2008) recipient of the 2010 CCCC Outstanding Book Award; the collection Rhetoric, History, and Women’s Oratorical Education: American Women Learn to Speak (2013, coedited with Catherine Hobbs); Educating the New Southern Woman: Speech, Writing, and Race at the Public Women’s Colleges, 1884-1945 (2014, coauthored with Catherine Hobbs); and the collection Women at Work: Rhetorics of Gender and Labor (2019, coedited with Jessica Enoch).

I am currently studying black women's rhetorical activism in the age of Jim Crow and have an 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 a coedited a special issue of College English on integrating digital humanities and historiography in rhetoric and composition and two essays coauthored with UM PhD students: "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).