Masters of Rhetoric Program
The Rhetoric graduate faculty bring students into contact with the major subfields of rhetoric that can be pursued for the Ph.D. In addition, they advise students on a range of non-academic opportunities beyond the M.A.
The M.A. in Rhetoric is a one-year intensive program in rhetoric, writing, and communication that prepares students for a variety of contexts including, but not limited to, the Ph.D. degree in rhetoric; related academic and professional graduate programs, including law school, policy work, work in nonprofits; and work as a writing editor or writing tutor in college, school, company, and freelance settings.
For students interested in pursuing a Rhetoric Ph.D., the Rhetoric faculty are resources for helping with acceptance into a leading Rhetoric Ph.D. program (which, for some students, has been CMU’s Ph.D. program). M.A. students will take courses with Rhetoric Ph.D.'s and learn what is required for success as a Ph.D. The M.A. Rhetoric program is open to both part-time and full-time students. Additional reasons for choosing the Rhetoric M.A. include:
- The size and quality of the rhetoric faculty. The rhetoric faculty are recognized leaders in rhetorical theory and its relationship to composition, cognition, discourse, visual design, politics, law, feminism, translation, embodiment, pedagogy, statistics, computing, and technology. Whatever the interest in rhetoric, students will find it among our faculty — and the program's faculty will take an interest in each individual student. They take as much pride in their mentoring as in their research.
- The quality of the English department and of CMU. CMU is a tier-one research institution with an accomplished faculty in many fields related to rhetoric. M.A. students can take elective courses across programs in the English Department and in other departments. Students have the opportunity to work with the English Department's distinguished faculty in Literary and Cultural Studies and with faculty members in history, anthropology, design, psychology, sociology, and computer science. Faculty in our storied creative writing program are also available to work with M.A. students in rhetoric on select projects.
- Opportunities to tutor in a state-of-the art communication center that specializes in applying research-based instruction to develop communicators’ skills in a range of contexts: from first-year writing to advanced, cutting-edge scientific and technical research. Graduate tutors have gone on to a range of positions as college writing instructors, technical communicators, and secondary school instructors.
Learning Objectives
- Use disciplinary vocabulary from rhetorical and/or Writing Studies scholarship appropriately in analyses.
- Deploy rhetorical and/or Writing Studies theories/frameworks appropriately to describe, explain, or critique artifacts of communication.
- Apply methods appropriately to answer research questions commonly asked in Rhetoric and Writing Studies.
- Explain how contexts and identities (historical, social, economic, political, technological, etc.) influence rhetorical forms, language, and practice, and how rhetorical forms, language, and practice shape the contexts of use.
- Exhibit competence in reading, writing, and speaking in academic and professional contexts by identifying scholarly niches/research questions and synthesizing evidence to support a claim.
Faculty Spotlight
Nupoor Ranade
Assistant Professor of Rhetoric and Technical Communication
Professor Ranade’s interdisciplinary expertise stems from a humanities (graduate) and engineering (undergraduate) education which has helped her bring together critical questions about communication, audience, ethics and inclusion from the humanities, to rapidly changing and advancing technologies such as AI, that lie at the intersection of both disciplines. Her core research lies in technical communication and user research. She explores the histories of knowledge production practices, the impact of socio-technical disruptions on those practices, and the role of audiences both human and non-human. With one foot in academia and another in industry, Ranade’s goal is to bridge the gap between technical communication practice and pedagogy. Her work in these areas has been published in high impact journals including but not limited to AI & Society, Technical Communication, Computers and Composition, and IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication (IEEE TPC). She has won several grants to bring humanities perspectives to Engineering research and education. She serves on the board of IEEE TPC, University of Michigan’s Sweetland Digital Rhetoric Collaborative (DRC) and Ontario Tech University’s Digital Life Institute. Ranade is also involved with local, regional and international professional communities such as Write the Docs (Pittsburgh Chapter). In the graduate professional writing and rhetoric programs, Professor Ranade teaches courses on Digital Rhetorics, Audience (User Experience) and Professional Writing and Editing.
