Department of English
Susan Wells
Susan Wells's most recent book is Our Bodies, Ourselves and the Work of Writing (Stanford University Press, 2010). Her interests include rhetoric and composition, critical theory, theories of the public sphere, and feminist studies of science. Wells's book on nineteenth-century women physicians and scientific writing, Out of the Dead House, was published by the University of Wisconsin Press in 2001, and won the 2002 W. Ross Winterowd Award for the most outstanding book in composition theory. She has also published Sweet Reason: Rhetoric and the Discourses of Modernity (Chicago, 1996) and The Dialectics of Representation (Johns Hopkins University, 1985).
Susan Wells teaches courses in the history of rhetoric, political rhetoric, and the rhetoric of science. She received the College of Liberal Arts Distinguished Teaching Award in 2001.
Selected Bibliography
Our Bodies, Ourselves and the Work of Writing. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 2010.
“Technology, Genre, and Gender: The Case of Power Structure Research,” in Rhetorics and Technologies, Ed. Stuart Selber. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2010, 151-72.
“Stories and Their Structures: Narrative Forms in Our Bodies, Ourselves,” in Women Physicians, Women’s Politics, and Women’s Health, Ed. Manon Parry and Ellen Moore. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009, 184-204.
“Our Bodies, Ourselves: Reading the Written Body,” Signs: a Journal of Women in Culture and Society 33, no 3 (Spring 2008), 697-724.