Carolyn Skinner teaches courses in rhetoric, including Arts of Persuasion; Rhetorics of Health, Illness and Wellness; and Methods for the Study of Writing, Rhetoric and Literacy. Her research focuses on historical scientific, professional and medical writing in the 19th-century United States, especially that by and about women. She has examined how early women physicians claimed the authority and expertise to write persuasively as doctors at a time when “woman” and “medical professional” were believed to be incompatible. She has also explored how 19th-century men and women used medical/scientific arguments in the debate over women's rights. Most recently, she has investigated rhetorical reception (how audiences use a text that they read to inform, support or inspire their own writing) as an important form of communicative activity. Throughout her rhetorical research, Dr. Skinner seeks to understand how medical/scientific/professional discourses affected women’s social position and how women themselves used those discourses to affect the world around them.