Kristin Arola

Endowed Professors College of Arts and Letters

• Karen L. Gillmor, Ph.D., Endowed Professor in Professional and Public Writing
• Established through a gift from Karen L. Gillmor

• Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures

Bio

Arola’s research and teaching focuses on composing as culturing. Specifically, she explores how the ways we write/design/make, as well as the ways we teach writing/designing/making, culture us into particular ways of being and particular sets of values. By looking to the relations between land, histories, and cultures, she considers how the words, designs, and images we compose evoke the past while opening up possible futures. To do this work, she brings together composition theory, making culture, digital rhetoric, environmental rhetoric, and cultural rhetoric.

Through her mother, she is a first-generation descendent of the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community Lake Superior Band of Chippewa Indians (bear clan). Along with her WRAC appointment, she is also an affiliate faculty member in the American Indian and Indigenous Studies program, the Digital Humanities program, and the Center for Interdisciplinarity.

Learn more about Kristin Arola.