Awards
The Coalition confers five awards that were created to honor the scholars after whom they were named. These women have had immeasurable impact on the Coalition and the field of feminist research. In addition, the Coalition has instantiated a dissertation award and a feminist research grant, each made possible through the generosity of founding members and donors.
The Kathleen Ethel Welch Outstanding Article Award
Description
The Kathleen Ethel Welch Outstanding Article Award is presented biennially in odd years for refereed work published in Peitho journal to recognize outstanding scholarship and research in the areas of feminist pedagogy, practice, history, and theory. The award carries a $200.00 honorarium and is presented at the Wednesday evening meeting of the Coalition at the Conference on College Composition and Communication.
Award Recipients
2023—Sarah Dwyer, “A Question of Affect: A Queer Reading of Institutional Nondiscrimination Statements at Texas Public Universities,” published in Peitho (24.2, 2022).
Honorable mentions go to Ronisha Browdy, “Black Women’s Rhetoric(s): A Conversation Starter for Naming and Claiming a Field of Study,” published in Peitho (23.4, 2021) and to Efe Franca Plange, “The Pepper Manual: Toward Situated Non-Western Feminist Rhetorical Practices,” published in Peitho (23.4, 2021).
2021—Ana Milena Ribero and Sonia C. Arellano, “Advocating Comadrismo: A Feminist Mentoring Approach for Latinas in Rhetoric and Composition,” published in Peitho (21.2, 2019).
Honorable mentions go to Patricia Fancher, Gesa Kirsch, and Alison Williams, “Feminist Practices in Digital Humanities Research: Visualizing Women Physician’s Networks of Solidarity, Struggle, and Exclusion,” published in Peitho (22.2, 2020) and to GPat Patterson and Leland G. Spencer, “Toward Trans Rhetorical Agency: A Critical Analysis of Trans Topics in Rhetoric and Composition and Communication Scholarship,” published in Peitho (22.4, 2020).
2019—Leah DiNatale Gutenson and Michelle Bachelor Robinson, “Race, Women, Methods, and Access: A Journey through Cyberspace and Back” Published in Peitho (19.1, 2017).
2017—Stacey Waite, “Cultivating the Scavenger: A Queerer Feminist Future for Composition and Rhetoric,” published in Peitho (18.1, 2016).
Honorable mentions go to Jessica Restaino and Susan Lundy Maute, “Surrender as Method: Research, Writing, Rhetoric, Love,” published in Peitho (18.1, 2016) and to Katherine Fredlund, “Forget the Master’s Tools, We Will Build Our Own House: The Woman’s Era as a Rhetorical Forum for the Invention of African American Womanhood,” published in Peitho (18.2, 2016).
2015—Amanda Moulder for “By Women You Were Brought Forth into this World: Cherokee Women’s Oratorical Education in the late Eighteenth Century,” published in Rhetoric, History, and Women’s Oratorical Education: American Women Learn to Speak edited by David Gold and Catherine L. Hobbs (New York: Routledge, 2013).
Honorable mention goes to Melanie Yergeau for “Clinically Significant Disturbance: On Theorists Who Theorize Theory of Mind,” published in Disability Studies Quarterly (2013).
2013—Jessica Enoch and Jordynn Jack for “Remembering Sappho: New Perspectives on Teaching (and Writing) Women’s Rhetorical History,” published in College English (May 2011).
2011—Tarez Samra Graban and Kathleen J. Ryan for “Theorizing Feminist Pragmatic Rhetoric as a Communicative Art for the Composition Practicum,” published in College Composition and Communication (61.1, Sep 2009).
Eligibility
An eligible work must have been published in Peitho in the two years prior to the year of the award. (For example, a work eligible for the 2025 award will have been published in calendar year 2023 or 2024.) Single or multiple authored articles are eligible.
Review Criteria
- Is the work relevant to and may it be situated within the broadly defined fields of feminist research in Composition and Rhetoric?
- Does the work demonstrate a fair and balanced research agenda in the form of feminist inquiry: archival, historical, classroom-based, community based, empirical, or theoretical work?
- Is the need for this research within the field clear and compelling?
- Is this research problem couched within existing scholarship of the field?
- Does the scholarship provide a framework by which the field may be advanced by other researchers?
- Does the work make a substantial contribution to the field?
Contact
For additional information about this award, please contact Jess Enoch, Immediate Past President (jenoch1@umd.edu).
The Winifred Bryan Horner Outstanding Book Award
Description
The Winifred Bryan Horner Outstanding Book Award is presented biennially in even years for work in the field of composition and rhetoric to recognize outstanding scholarship and research in the areas of feminist pedagogy, practice, history, and theory. The award carries a $200.00 honorarium and is presented at the Wednesday evening meeting of the Coalition at the Conference on College Composition and Communication.
Award Recipients
2024—Heather Brook Adams for her monograph Enduring Shame: A Recent History of Unwed Pregnancy and Righteous Reproduction (U of South Carolina P, 2022).
V. Jo Hsu for their monograph Constellating Home:Trans and Queer Asian American Rhetorics (Ohio State UP, 2022).
Honorable mentions go to: Jane Greer for Unorganized Women Repetitive Rhetorical Labor and Low-Wage Workers, 1834-1937 (U of Pittsburgh P, 2023); and Leigh Gruwell for Making Matters: Craft, Ethics, and New Materialist Rhetorics (Utah State UP, 2022); and Jennifer Nish for Activist Literacies: Transnational Feminisms and Social Media Rhetorics (U of South Carolina P, 2022); and Jacqueline Jones Royster for Making the World a Better Place: African American Women Advocates, Activists, and Leaders, 1773-1990 (U of Pittsburgh P, 2023).
2022— Stephanie Larson for her monograph What It Feels Like: Visceral Rhetoric and the Politics of Rape Culture (Penn State University Press, 2021).
Honorable mentions go to Karma R. Chávez for The Borders of AIDS: Race, Quarantine, and Resistance (University of Washington Press, 2021); and Katie Fredlund, Kerri Hauman, and Jessica Ouellette, eds., for Feminist Connections: Rhetoric and Activism across Time, Space, and Place (University of Alabama Press, 2020); and Michelle C. Smith for Utopian Genderscapes: Rhetorics of Women’s Work in the Early Industrial Age (Southern Illinois University Press, 2021).
2020— Jess Enoch for her monograph Domestic occupations: Spatial Rhetorics and Women’s Work (Southern Illinois University Press, 2019).
Honorable mentions go to Cheryl Glenn for Rhetorical Feminism and this Thing Called Hope (Southern Illinois University Press, 2019) and Pamela VanHaitsma for Queering Romantic Engagement in the Postal Age: A Rhetorical Education (University of South Carolina Press, 2019).
2018—Jean Bessette for her monograph Retroactivism in the Lesbian Archives (Southern Illinois University Press, 2017).
Honorable mentions go to Rebecca Lorimer Leonard for her monograph Writing on the Move (Pittsburgh University Press, 2017) and to Eric Darnell Pritchard for his monograph Fashioning Lives (Southern Illinois University Press, 2017).
2016—Cristina Devereaux Ramírez for her monograph Occupying Our Space: The Mestiza Rhetorics of Mexican Women Journalists and Activists, 1875-1942 (University of Arizona Press, 2015).
Honorable mention goes to Carolyn Skinner for her monograph Women Physicians and Professional Ethos in Nineteenth-Century America (Southern Illinois University Press, 2015).
2014—Jacqueline Jones Royster and Gesa E. Kirsch for their co-authored Feminist Rhetorical Practices: New Horizons for Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy Studies (Southern Illinois University Press, 2012).
2012—Susan Delagrange for Technologies of Wonder: Rhetorical Practice in a Digital World (USUP and CCDP, 2011).
2010—Mary P. Sheridan-Rabideau for Girls, Feminism, and Grassroots: Activism in the GirlZone (SUNY Press, 2008).
Eligibility
An eligible work must have been published in the two years previous to the year of the award. (For example, a work eligible for the 2026 award will have been published in calendar year 2024 or 2025.) Single or multiple authored books, as well as edited volumes, are eligible. We welcome nominations from authors, editors, publishers, or readers. To be eligible for the award, a nominee must be a member of Coalition at the time of nomination.
Review Criteria
- Is the work relevant to and may it be situated within the broadly defined fields of feminist research in Composition and Rhetoric?
- Does the work demonstrate a fair and balanced research agenda in the form of feminist inquiry: archival, historical, classroom-based, community based, empirical, or theoretical work?
- Is the need for this research within the field clear and compelling?
- Is this research problem couched within existing scholarship of the field?
- Does the scholarship provide a framework by which the field may be advanced by other researchers?
- Does the work make a substantial contribution to the field?
Nominations and Contact
The nomination deadline for the 2026 award will be announced in 2025. Nominations must include five (5) copies of the book and a brief (500 words) nominating statement. Electronic submissions are accepted. Alternatively, please send all materials to:
Jess Enoch,
Immediate Past President, CFSHRC
Department of English
University of Maryland
2119 Tawes Hall
College Park, MD 20742
Contact Jess Enoch (jenoch1@umd.edu) to submit nomination materials for the award or for additional information.
The Nan Johnson Outstanding Graduate Student Travel Award
Description
The Nan Johnson Outstanding Graduate Student Travel Award is presented biennially in odd years to graduate students working in the field of composition and rhetoric and it recognizes outstanding scholarship and research in the areas of feminist pedagogy, practice, history, and theory. The award is designed to enable students to attend the Feminisms and Rhetorics conference by providing $200.00 travel stipends plus conference registration.
Award Recipients
FemRhet 2023 —Merissa Boglin, University of Alabama
Samira Grayson, Middle Tennessee State University
Juliette Holder, Texas Women’s University
Julie Kidder, Carnegie Mellon University
Jeanetta Mohkle-Hill, Michigan State University
Temitope Ojedele, Virginia Tech University
Sidney Turner, Syracuse University
SIGDOC 2021* — Morgan Banville, East Carolina University
RSA 2021 Summer Institute* — Brienna Fleming, Ohio University
Priyanka (Priya) Ganguly, Virginia Tech
Ashley Pendleton, University of Missouri-Kansas City
Laura Rosche, Indiana University
Rhiannon Scharnhorst, University of Cincinnati
Nisha Shanmugaraj, Carnegie Mellon University
Rachel Stroup, University of Maryland
Basanti Timalsina, Michigan Tech
*Due to the cancellation of the 2021 Feminisms and Rhetorics Conference, awards were conferred for related virtual meetings where the work of the Coalition could be forwarded.
FemRhet 2019 — Alex Hanson, Syracuse University
Nancy Henaku, Michigan Tech
Pritisha Shrestha, Syracuse University
Karen Trujillo, New Mexico State University
Elizabeth Tacke, University of Michigan
FemRhet 2017 — Ruth Osorio, University of Maryland
Sweta Baniya, Purdue University
Tamara Bassam Issak, University of Syracuse
Jennifer Enoch, Florida State University
Marion Wolfe, Ohio State University
FemRhet 2015 — April Cobos, Old Dominion University
FemRhet 2013 — Award not given this year
FemRhet 2011 — Tara Wood, University of Oklahoma
Eligibility
- Student must be an accepted presenter at the conference
- Student must be a Coalition member at the time of nomination
How to Apply
The next awards will be announced, judged, and conferred in 2025. A deadline for applications will be posted closer to the date of the conference. Applicants should provide the following items:
- A letter attesting to their eligibility (see above) and describing the ways in which their research is consistent with the conference theme and with the mission of the Coalition
- A letter from a faculty mentor in their program indicating support for the application and that they do not have other significant financial support for the conference. This letter may be sent separately, directly by the faculty mentor.
Please direct applications and any questions about this award to Jess Enoch, Immediate Past President, at jenoch1@umd.edu.
The Lisa Ede Mentoring Award
Description
The CFSHRC Lisa Ede Mentoring Award is presented biennially in odd years to an individual or group with a career-record of mentorship, including formal and informal advising of students and colleagues; leadership in campus, professional, and/or local communities; and other activities that align with the overall mission and goals of the Coalition. The award carries an honorarium of $200.00 per person or $500.00 for a group of three or more people and is announced at the biennial Feminisms and Rhetorics Conference.
Award Recipients
2023 — Gwendolyn Pough, Dean’s Professor of the Humanities, Women’s and Gender Studies / Syracuse University
2021 — Stephanie Kerschbaum, Professor of English / University of Washington
2019 — Adela Licona, Professor Emeritus / University of Arizona
2017 — Kristine Blair, Dean of College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences / Youngstown State University
2015 — Cheryl Glenn, Distinguished Professor of English and Women’s Studies / Penn State University
Eligibility
This award is open to all colleagues in rhetoric and composition or related fields with a minimum of 10 years’ post-graduate professional experience, including current and retired faculty, staff, and administrators; independent scholars; and other academic professionals.
Review Criteria
Nominations should include a minimum of three letters from individuals or co-writers with direct knowledge of the nominee(s). Overall, letters should be descriptive, offering concrete examples of the nominee’s or nominees’ mentoring activities and their impact. Letters should also illuminate the nominee’s or nominees’ contribution to rhetoric and composition (and related fields), feminist academic work (including teaching, research and scholarship, service, and civic engagement), and the CFSHRC and its members (as applicable).
Recipients of this award will have a career record of feminist mentorship in both formal and informal educational settings, including (but not limited to) academic departments and programs, writing and community centers, and professional and community organizations. Recipients of this award will not only embody the spirit of the Coalition’s commitment to the care and collaboration involved in mentoring; they will also enrich and even expand that definition through their examples.
Nomination Contact and Procedures
The next deadline for submissions will be announced closer to the dates of the 2025 Feminisms and Rhetorics conference. Applicants should submit all materials as a single PDF. To submit an application, or if you have questions about this award, please contact Jess Enoch, Immediate Past President, at jenoch1@umd.edu.
The Shirley Wilson Logan Diversity Scholarship Award
Description
The purpose of the Shirley Wilson Logan Diversity Scholarship award is to encourage feminist scholarship (particularly historical in nature) by graduate scholars from diverse and historically un or underrepresented groups. The award will be given to first-time presenters at the Feminisms and Rhetorics conference. The award includes both a monetary award ($500 each for up to 6 awardees) and participation in a specially designated session at the Feminisms and Rhetorics conference.
Award Recipients
2023
Morgan Carter, University of North Carolina, Greensboro, “Rhetorical Reckonings with Reproduction Post-Dobbs”
Nissele Contreras, Michigan State University, “Constellating, Complicating, and Celebrating: Rhetorical Belonging Across Communities”
Nicole Koyuki Golden, Michigan State University, “Constellating, Complicating, and Celebrating: Rhetorical Belonging Across Communities”
Erin Green, University of Maryland, “Feminist Mentorship by Grad Students, for Grad Students”
Marissa Kessenich, University of Virginia, “Black Feminism: Storytelling, Disruption, and Archival Curation”
Lamaya Williams, Old Dominion University, “Feminist Activism as Lifework: Generating Six Principles of Activism”
2021
Nisha Shanmugaraj (Carnegie Mellon University) — for first-time attendance at the National Women’s Studies Association Conference, to present “How Second Generation Indian-American Women Construct National Belonging.” (Awarded for this presentation due to cancellation of 2021 Feminisms and Rhetorics Conference.)
Eligibility
As an organization, we are defining un/underrepresented groups as:
- Scholars of diverse racial/ethnic backgrounds
- International scholars
- Scholars who identify as LGBTQIA
- Scholars with disabilities
- Graduate scholars who were first-generation undergraduates
In addition, scholars must meet the following requirements:
- Be a first-time presenter at the Feminisms and Rhetorics conference
- Be a member of the Coalition at the time of application
- Have an already accepted presentation for the conference
- Have firm plans to attend the conference (scholars who do not attend will forfeit the financial compensation for the award)
Review Criteria
The goal of the award is diversity and inclusion of underrepresented scholars vs. topics (as long as the work itself falls within the broader category of feminist rhetorical studies). Please keep this in mind as you submit your materials.
How to Apply
The next award will be conferred in 2025. The application deadline will be announced closer to the dates for the 2025 Feminisms and Rhetorics conference. Applicants should submit a completed application form, a letter of recommendation for the award, a current CV, and a copy of their conference acceptance and confirmation. Please direct application materials and any questions to Jess Enoch Immediate Past President (jenoch1@umd.edu).
The Presidents Dissertation Award
Description
In recognition of the close relationship between scholarly excellence and professional leadership, the CFSHRC Presidents Dissertation Award is given to the author(s) of a recently completed doctoral dissertation that makes an outstanding contribution to our understanding of feminist histories, theories, and pedagogies of rhetoric and composition. This award is adjudicated every year and carries a $200.00 honorarium.
Award Recipients
2023 — Nisha Shanmugaraj (Carnegie Mellon University), Negotiating the Model Minority: How Indian American Women Rearticulate Dominant Racial Discourse; and Salma Kalim (Miami University), Affect and Digital Circulation in Pakistani Feminist Rhetorics.
2022 — Katie Bramlett (University of Maryland), Genres of Memory and Asian/American Activism.
Honorable Mention: Danielle Griffin (University of Maryland), Working Literacies: Gender, Labor, and Literacy in Early Modern England, and Melissa Marie Stone (North Carolina State University), Rhetorics of Menstruation: Mattering Menstrual Healthcare Technologies.
2021 — Emily N. Smith (Penn State University), Performing Histories: Archival Embodiment as Rhetorical Historiography; and Luhui Whitebear (Oregon State University), Secrets of Survival: Intergenerational Storytelling and Cultural Healing Through Gendered Rhetoric and Representation in Indigenous Activist Circles.
2020 — J. Logan Smilges (Penn State University), Queer Silence: Rhetorics of Resistance; and Temptaous T. Mckoy (East Carolina University), Y’all Call It Technical and Professional Communication, We Call It #ForTheCulture: The Use of Amplification Rhetorics in Black Communities and Their Implications for Technical and Professional Communication Studies.
Honorable Mention: Nabila Hijazi (University of Maryland), Syrian Refugee Women in the Diaspora: Sustaining Families through Literacies.
2019 — Sherita Roundtree (Ohio State University), Pedagogies of Noise: Black Women’s Teaching Efficacy and Pedagogical Approaches in Composition Classrooms.
2018 — Liane Malinowski (University of Massachusetts, Amherst), Civic Domesticity: Rhetoric, Women, and Space at Hull House, 1889-1910.
2017 — Jessica Ouellette (University of Massachusetts, Amherst), Enduring Affective Rhetorics: Transnational Feminist Action in Digital Spaces.
2016 — Gracemarie Mike Fillanwerth (Purdue University), Rhetoric and Feminism in the Americanization Era: The YWCA’s Rhetorical Education Program for Immigrant Women.
Eligibility
Any doctoral dissertation that engages feminist histories, theories, and/or pedagogies of rhetoric and composition and is completed within appropriate time frames (see below) is eligible for this award.
- For the 2024 Award: Any PhD dissertation completed (defended and filed/deposited with the institution) between 6/1/2023 and 5/31/2024 is eligible.
Review Criteria
The doctoral dissertations that receive this award will not only rigorously engage extant feminist research and scholarship in rhetoric and composition, reflective of the many cultural and intellectual traditions that comprise our field; they will also enhance our understanding of feminist academic work in rhetoric and composition through the methods and methodologies they employ, the critical praxes they model, and the conclusions they draw along with the invitations they offer for subsequent inquiry and exchange.
Nomination Contact and Procedures
The deadline for nominations for the next award cycle (the 2024 Award), including self-nomination, is June 15, 2024. Nominees should submit an electronic copy of the completed dissertation in its final form, as it was submitted to the author’s (or authors’) home institution to Jess Enoch, Immediate Past President, at jenoch1@umd.edu. Please also provide documentation of completion, including date of submission/deposit to the institution.
The 2024 award recipient(s) will be invited to receive their awards at the 2025 Conference on College Composition and Communication.
The Nancy A. Myers Feminist Research Grant
Description
The Coalition of Feminist Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition offers a biennial research grant of up to $700 for researchers to pursue or continue feminist projects that require funding to conduct such activities. These include but should not be limited to archival research, translation, interview transcription, and digital archivization and/or digital project development. The award is announced at the annual Coalition event at the Conference of College Composition and Communication in even years.
Award Recipients
2024
Amy Gerald, PhD (University of South Carolina, Lancaster) — for research at the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center (MSRC) at Howard University to access undigitized material in the Archibald Grimké and Angelina Weld Grimké papers.
2022
Brenna Swift, doctoral candidate (University of Wisconsin-Madison) — for “We Write as Dream: Journaling to Live, Imagine, and Write Just World.”
2020
Tobi Jacobi, PhD (Colorado State University). Jacobi’s research will explore the literacy opportunities and rhetorical practices available for girls at the New York State Training School for Girls from 1904 to 1935.
2018
Christine Garcia, PhD (Eastern Connecticut State University) — for “Researching the Huerta Papers at Wayne State University”
Krystin Gollihue (NC State University) — for “Makerspaces, Craft Communities, and Non-Institutional Spaces of Making”
Nancy Henaku (Michigan Technological University) — for “Researching the Rhetoric of Nana Konadu Agyeman”
Eligibility
- Applicants must show evidence of a solid project/proposed project that relates to the mission of the Coalition (see below) and necessitates this additional research support activity.
- Preference will be given to scholars with no other documented source of funding
- Applicants may be at any stage of a research project that necessitates the supporting activity the grant would propose.
- Applicants must be members of the Coalition of Feminist Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition.
How to Apply
A call for the 2026 award and a deadline for applications will be circulated in 2025. Applicants should submit a completed application form and two confidential letters of recommendation to Jess Enoch, Immediate Past President (jenoch1@umd.edu). Questions should be directed to this address as well.
[Download research grant application]
