Victor Villanueva

Biography:

Victor Villanueva is Regents Professor and Edward R. Meyer Distinguished Professor of Liberal Arts at Washington State University. He received his PhD in English with an emphasis in Rhetoric and Writing from the University of Washington in 1986. Since then, he has worked at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, Northern Arizona University, and Auburn University, as well as Washington State University. He came to Washington State University in 1995, where he has served as Director of Composition, English Department Chair, Associate Dean, and Director of American Studies. He is the current Director of the Writing Program and is the editor of theStudies in Writing and Rhetoric book series. He served as the head of the national organization for Rhetoric and Writing Studies, the Conference on College Composition and Communication, from 1997 to 2000. Over the years, he has received a number of honors, including the Richard A. Meade Award for Distinguished Research in English Education (1994), the David H. Russell Award for Distinguished Research and Scholarship in English (1995), Rhetorician of the Year (1999), the Advancement of People of Color Leadership Award (2008), and the disciplines’ (rhetoric and composition studies) Exemplar Award (2009). Within Washington State University, he has received the Martin Luther King Distinguished Service Award (1999) and the Sahlin Faculty Excellence Award for Research, Scholarship, and the Arts (2005). Graduate Students declared him Mentor of the Year in American Studies (2009), Most Supportive Faculty Member (1998 and 2010), and declared his graduate seminar the year’s best on three occasions (2000, 2006, and 2010). All of his efforts center on the connections between language and relations of power, especially racism.

Publications:

Villanueva is the author, editor, or co-editor of eight books and nearly fifty articles or chapters in books. Among his books is the award-winning Bootstraps, From an American Academic of Color, Rhetorics of the Americas: 3114 BCE to 2013 CE, andCross-Talk in Comp Theory: A Reader, one of the most-adopted books for the training of English teachers of writing in the U.S. and abroad. As well, he has edited or co-edited two special editions of the journal College English. His work is often anthologized, his writing having twice been chosen as The Common Reading at Buffalo State University. He has also delivered well over a hundred talks nationally and internationally, including nearly fifty keynote or plenary addresses and two distinguished visiting professorship addresses.

Teaching:

Villanueva’s over thirty years of teaching have included fifteen different undergraduate course topics—from teaching writing to underprepared first-year students, to the connections between literacy and politics, to the rhetorics of racism. He has also taught over a dozen graduate courses—from methods of teaching writing to the rhetorics of political economy. As well, he has served on well over a hundred graduate student MA and PhD committees, supervising seventy-five of those. His research interests are reflected in his scholarship; and his scholarship is reflected in his teaching and mentoring of future scholars.