Bibhushana Poudyal

  1. Assistant Professor
Email Addressbibhushana.poudyal@wsu.edu
LocationAvery 329
Phone509-335-8948

Biography

Visit my personal website (*See disclaimer).

Bibhushana Poudyal is a Nepali Assistant Professor of English at Washington State University (WSU). Her research, teaching, administrative, and service interests are grounded in anti-oppressive approaches to Internationalist Feminist Rhetorics, Global South Rhetorics, Public Rhetorics, Critical Cultural Rhetorics, Technical and Professional Communication, and Digital and Multimodal Humanities, Archives, Storytelling, Writing, and Literacies. She is currently serving on the College of Arts and Sciences’ inaugural Equity and Outreach Advisory Council at WSU. Her research and teaching emerge from the intervening philosophies and praxes of Internationalism and Global South Solidarities (GSS). She aims to build and practice solidarity among academic workers and community members committed to making decolonial feminist knowledge systems, experiences, and voices of the global majority and global plurality as a transformative and dignified force within academia and beyond. In 2024, the students in her graduate seminar, inspired by the same vision, founded a student organization called Global South Solidarities at WSU (*See disclaimer), for which she now serves as the faculty advisor.

She has a monograph publication titled, Gendering South Asia: Rhetorical Non-Phallic Bodies in the Global Capital (*See disclaimer), with Routledge (2025). The book analyzes heteronormative rhetorics built around cis women, trans folx, and queer bodies through policies, jurisdictions, media, international and regional laws, religious laws and prescriptions. While doing that, the book delves into narratives and rhetorics of feminist and queer activisms and activists rewriting and re-rhetoricizing their bodies, ontologies, and epistemologies and threatening cis-heteronormative rhetorics.

Currently, she is working on her multimodal digital and scholarly research project, Re-Rhetoricizing Global Souths Contrapuntally. In this project, she brings several examples from South Asia, the Middle East, the Americas, Africa, and Turtle Island to demonstrate the vicious continuum between rhetorical violence and material violence and what the field and subfields of Humanities and Social Sciences can do to confront the ways empire, capitalism, racism, heteropatriarchy, and digital colonialism silence, erase, and exploit Global South communities—while also tracing the insurgent strategies those same communities deploy to survive, resist, revolt, reclaim, and speak back.

Her scholarship and teaching have been recognized and supported through some of the prestigious institutional honors at WSU. In consecutive years—2024 and 2025—she has been honored to receive the Buchanan Distinguished Assistant Professorship. In 2025, she also received the highly competitive New Faculty Seed Grant for my project, Digital Storytelling and Global South Solidarities: Justice-Driven Open Scholarship in Humanities. Notably, by 2025, she taught two graduate seminars at WSU that emerged from her research areas: “Archives, Rhetoricity of Technologies, and Anti-Oppressive Interventions” and “Comparative Antiracist Pedagogies.” Both seminars were recognized with the English Graduate Organization’s “Best Graduate Seminar of the Year” award in successive years (2024 and 2025).

Selected Publications

  • Poudyal, Bibhushana. (2025). Gendering South Asia: Rhetorical Non-Phallic Bodies in the Global Capital. Routledge.
  • Poudyal, Bibhushana. (2025). “Challenging racism, perpetuating casteism: South Asian moral contradictions in the diaspora.” Quarterly Journal of Speech, 111(3), 515–519. https://doi.org/10.1080/00335630.2025.2502338
  • Poudyal, Bibhushana and Mala Rai. (2023). “The Smell of the Other and Self-Alienation: A Mani(fold)festo of Race, Ethnicity, and Fear of One’s Own “Haunting Cooking Odors.”” In Eileen E. Schell, Dianna Winslow, and Pritisha Shrestha (Eds.) Food Justice Activism and Pedagogies: Literacies and Rhetorics for Transforming Food Systems in Local and Transnational Contexts (pp. 71-83). Lexington Books.
  • Poudyal, Bibhushana. (2022). “Counter, Contradictory, and Contingent Digital-Storytelling through Theories-Praxes of Community-Based Participatory Research and Minimal Computing.” In Crystal VanKooten and Victor J. Del Hierro (Eds.), Methods and Methodologies for Research in Digital Writing and Rhetoric (205-224). WAC Clearinghouse. https://doi.org/10.37514/PRA-B.2022.1541.2.09
  • Poudyal, Bibhushana. (2021). “The “Nature” of Ethics While (Digitally) Archiving the Other.” [Special issue on Unsettling the Archives.] Across the Disciplines, 18(1/2), 177-190. https://doi.org/10.37514/ATD-J.2021.18.1-2.14
  • Poudyal, Bibhushana, Tetyana Zhyvotovska, Estefania Castillo, Nora Rivera, Ann Shivers-McNair, Joy Robinson, and Laura Gonzales. (2020). “Interrogating what we mean by “Making”: Stories from Women who Make in Community.” In Maggie Melos and Jennifer Nichols (Eds.), Re-making the Library Makerspace: Critical Theories, Reflections, and Practices (pp. 203-224). Library Juice Press.
  • Poudyal, Bibhushana. (2020). Building Digital Archive through Collaborative UX Research: Relationship-Building with the Community or Knowledge-Building about the Community? In Proceedings of the 38th ACM International Conference on Design of Communication (SIGDOC ’20), October 03-04, 2020, Denton, TX, USA. ACM, New York, NY, USA, https://doi.org/10.1145/3380851.3416767
  • Poudyal, Bibhushana and Laura Gonzales. (2019). ““So You Want to Build a Digital Archive?” A Dialogue on Critical Digital Humanities Graduate Pedagogy.” JITP Pedagogy. 15. [Open Source]
  • Poudyal, Bibhushana. (2019). “Building Decolonial Digital Archives: Recognizing Complexities to Reimagine Possibilities.” Xchanges, 14.1. [Open Source]

Research and Teaching Interests

  • Anti-Oppressive Rhetorics, Praxes, and Pedagogies
  • Critical Archival Studies
  • Comparative Rhetorics
  • Cultural Criticism, Critical Theory, Rhetorical Theory, and Literary Theory
  • Decolonial Border(less) Rhetorics/the Borderlands
  • Design Justice
  • Digital-Multimodal Humanities
  • Global South Rhetorics
  • Internationalist/Transnational Feminisms
  • Public Rhetorics and Humanities
  • Queer Rhetorics
  • Technical and Professional Communication
  • Visual Rhetorics

*Disclaimer: This link leads to an external website that is not hosted by the university. The views and content expressed are those of the faculty member and do not represent the official positions of the university.